


Derelict

by put it back (HereThereBeFic)



Category: Portal (Video Game), Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Adventure, Gen, Science Fiction, Steam Powered Science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-14
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2017-11-12 03:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 42,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/485937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereThereBeFic/pseuds/put%20it%20back
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[[A Steam Powered Giraffe/Portal crossover fanfiction.]] He looked down at himself and realized he was wearing a distressingly orange jumpsuit. [[DISCONTINUED. Sorry!]]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Orange and Sideways

**Author's Note:**

> **ETA 2015, copypasted to all SPG stories:** I just want to note that this was written before Bunny's announcement about Rabbit's gender, hence all the incorrect "he" pronouns and etc. No disrespect meant to Bunny or her character.
> 
> I have considered going through all of my old SPG stuff and switching the pronouns and other relevant details but I am (for unrelated reasons) no longer a part of the SPG fandom and don't really know what's going on with the lore, whether Rabbit's pronouns etc were retconned vs if she canonically transitioned, and I would find it very emotionally taxing to go searching for the relevant answers and then comb through my old works to fix all the details in a way that makes sense. Tbh I kind of hope no one is still _finding_ any of these stories, and I'm mostly leaving them up in case any of them happen to be somebody's old favorite or something.

He woke up facedown on the floor, flipped over, and realized that no, it was actually the wall, because the room was sideways.

The bed he had apparently fallen out of was bolted to the floor a few feet up, and had a distressingly human-shaped dent in it. A distressingly old-smelling blanket was draped over a nightstand that had presumably gone crashing to the floor at the same time as him. He looked down at himself and realized he was wearing a distressingly orange jumpsuit, and that was perhaps the most distressing thing of all.

Except for the room being sideways. That was pretty messed up.

He blinked. Coughed. Opened his mouth to speak and coughed even harder, rolling over on his side and clutching at the ground – wall – as his vision swam.

He pulled in a deep breath and held it, tears streaming down his face as the dusty air hit his lungs and made things ten times worse. Finally he managed to sit up, one hand clutching his throat and the other pressed against his heaving chest. He doubled over and stared at the – _surface_ – until he could breathe somewhat normally.

Hair hung in tightly coiled ropes in front of his face. He pushed it away with a shaking hand and choked, “ _What._ ”

Nobody answered him. He guessed that, on the whole, that was probably a good thing.

He stood up. The room spun and he staggered over to the floor and leaned against it and tried not to think about that.

Instead he thought about the fact that he had been asleep long enough to leave an imprint in a mattress but his clothes (such as they were) were clean, his stomach wasn't cramping with hunger pains, he didn't have to pee, his muscles hadn't atrophied, and his hair was arranged in almost perfect dreadlocks that barely brushed past his shoulders rather than being a mass of tangled ratty horror sweeping the ground.

Wall.

Also, he didn't know his own name.

He didn't know where he was or why or how long he had been there or if there was any way out, but the lack of name disturbed him more than anything. He didn't know  _who he was_ .

He didn't know what he  _looked_ like or where he came from or how old he was or what he was good at or why he was in this place or what his life had been like before he'd come here – been brought here? – or whether he'd had dreadlocks his whole life or had them forced on him by kidnappers like he hoped the jumpsuit had been because if he was the kind of person who chose to wear an orange jumpsuit he didn't want to know himself.

He wracked his brain for anything at all – identity, memories, school, work, love, heartbreak – but all he could dredge up were vague flickers of machinery and fire and echoing shouts.

Disturbed, he dropped that line of thinking and focused instead on what his next move should be.

Something cooler and more productive than his first move anyway, which had apparently been falling out of bed. And landing a good six feet below it, but still. A little too  _helpless_ for his liking.

He backed away from the –  _wall_ , dammit, it was a wall now – and looked around, taking stock of things.

The wall he was standing on was mostly covered by a painting of a beach, as was one of its immediately adjacent counterparts. The wall opposite that one was blank, but two unlit lamps jutted out defiantly, and a picture frame was dangling pathetically from a nail that he wasn't going to think about because it should have rusted a long time ago.

He turned to look at the former ceiling. A broken lamp hung in the middle of it, and there was some sort of metal track running from near the lamp up to the wall that had become the new ceiling.

That wall was largely taken up by a closet jutting out from the side. He took a few steps to the right so he could see past it –

There was a door.

He sucked in a breath and closed his eyes, quashing his instinctive reaction – which called for a lot of jumping up and down and cheering and screaming – so he could think clearly.

He tried the late bedside dresser, but the drawers were empty. He kicked it and moved on.

The only other things he could reach were the blanket and a wooden-looking chair and desk (also empty) that could not possibly actually be made of wood because they hadn't rotted at all.

He looked at the chair and the desk. He looked at the blanket. He looked at the lamp on the ceiling and the track running all the way to the door.

He picked up the blanket and hoped the fact that he knew what a slip knot was meant he could actually tie one.


	2. A Very Quiet Mental Breakdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Blood and dead bodies.

This was not fun.

The first step after the knot had been dragging the desk over to the right spot against the ceiling and turning it over on its side, a process which served to remind him that he had in fact recently fallen a not inconsiderable distance and his limbs and muscles hadn't exactly appreciated the experience.

He stacked the chair on top of the desk and told himself he was lucky he hadn't broken his nose.

He rolled the blanket up and tied it around his waist, and then clambered carefully up onto the desk and remained in a crouch, holding as still as possible until he was sure everything wasn't about to go crashing down. Then he stood, keeping his eyes on the desk and his feet and definitely not the ground as he stepped up onto the chair and removed the blanket from around his waist. He adjusted the knot and looked up, trying to calculate the distance to the lamp. Then he took a deep breath, drew his arm back, and threw.

It caught. The end hung just below eye level.

Apparently  _lassoing_ was one of the things he was good at.

He hoped climbing the rope in PE had been another one.

After taking a brief moment to reflect on the fact that, while he could recall no specifics whatsoever about his own schooling, he  _did_ know gym class traditionally involved a rope, he tugged on the end of the blanket to test its strength. Nothing tore and the lamp didn't budge.

He reached up higher, gripping the blanket with both hands, and jumped.

The chair clattered to the floor, and he closed his eyes briefly and reminded himself that he'd fallen from much higher up than this earlier while he was  _sleeping_ and it had barely even hurt.

Then he started to climb. Hand over hand, clutching the blanket tightly and focusing on the lamp up ahead.

It wasn't that far.

He reached his destination and swung one leg up over it, using the blanket to hoist himself the rest of the way.

The lamp was round and relatively small, which made  standing a problem. He knelt on one knee, his other leg dangling over the side, and leaned as close to the surface of the ceiling as he could as he inspected the track that ran from the lamp to the door.

There were small bars inside it at intervals of a few inches, set back not  _ quite _ far enough to be unreachable. He could barely fit his hands inside to grab them, but it was better than nothing.

He stood, slowly and cautiously, and took hold of the highest bar he could reach.

-

It was better than nothing, but only just barely, and it was also  _ extremely painful and annoying _ .

The bars were tiny and the sides of the track were sharp. He was about halfway to the door now, but he'd sliced both of his hands, and everything was getting far too blood-slicked to hold on to. He gritted his teeth and let go with his right hand so he could wipe it on the jumpsuit, smearing blood across the bright orange. His left arm twinged in protest at suddenly being forced to bear all of his weight. He ignored it and repeated the process with his left hand before continuing on.

-

The part where the track changed direction to circumvent the closet actually wasn't as bad as he'd thought it was going to be. It jutted out from the ceiling just far enough to at least give him something to stand on for a moment while he wiped his hands off more effectively and eyed the door, wondering for the first time how he was going to actually  _open_ it.

At this point, brute force was probably his only option.

He shrugged and pulled himself up once again.

This half of the climb was much shorter, and he found to his surprise that the door was apparently automatic, because it sprang open when he was about two feet away from it.

Inward, so it was good that he hadn't been any closer.

The track continued out the door, and he made short work of hauling himself up and through. He collapsed on the surface outside and heaved a sigh of relief as he flexed his aching hands. He gave himself a moment to be pleased with his efforts and then stood up and looked around.

He was in a hallway. There were hundreds of identical doors running in both directions.

He raised an eyebrow. “Wish I had a coin to flip. Okay, which way, Scarecrow? ...The  _hell._ I don't know my own  _name,_ but I know about the Wizard of freaking  _Oz?_ ”

Growling under his breath, he turned and started moving to the left, figuring that there was no wrong way to go at this point.

He reached another door and paused, a realization freezing its way up his spine.

There were  _other people_ here.

He dropped into a crouch and rapped his knuckles on the door, hoping to trigger it into opening like his had. It didn't budge.

He stood up and kicked it – and it gave so easily that he nearly fell in.

He lay down on his stomach and peered inside. “Uh. Hello?”

No one answered. Maybe the room's occupant had been injured in their fall. He lowered himself down farther and scanned what he could see of the floor.

Desk, chair, picture frame, nightstand –

Skeleton.

He blinked. Several times. Shook his head. Lowered himself as far through the door as he dared and looked closer.

Definitely a skeleton. Wearing an orange jumpsuit.

He jerked back up into the hallway and backed away from the door, wishing it opened outward so he could slam it shut.

The next room also held a skeleton.

So did the room after that. And the next five after that one.

He backed up against the floor and stared at the ceiling, breathing hard, eyes wide.

_I am in a building full of dead people._

Dead people wearing the same clothes he was wearing, in rooms nearly identical to the one he had been trapped in. The fall obviously hadn't killed them, unless there was something in the air that caused bodies to decompose _very quickly_ , and he was pretty sure something like that would have been eating at his flesh by this point. Those people had been dead for a _long_ time.

He rubbed his hands together and realized that they were no longer sending shockwaves of pain up through his arms every few seconds. And the bleeding had slowed.

No. The bleeding had _stopped_.

He stared at his hands. They were _healed._ The numerous gashes, deep enough to have left scars, had completely vanished.

He was in a building full of decomposed dead people and his hands had just magically healed themselves.

The temptation to sink down the floor to the wall and have a mental breakdown was strong, but he shook his head and pushed off.

He moved on to the next door.

There was no harm in _trying_ – just in case. He took a moment to steel himself for the sight of yet another skeleton lying on the floor in a heap.

He did not see yet another skeleton lying on the floor in a heap. He saw something far worse. Something that took a moment to register, and when it did, it left him swallowing bile and scrambling away from the door.

He backed up against the floor, sank down it to the wall, and had a very short, very quiet mental breakdown.

Then he took a deep breath and pressed his hands (his _magically healed hands what the hell_ ) against his eyes, trying to stave off a headache. “Come on, Steve,” he muttered. “Get it together.”

He stood up.

He took five steps.

He stopped.

Steve.

_Oh._

Steve didn't try any more of the doors.


	3. Perception

Michael was asleep when the building collapsed.

Judging by the sound, and the dust that was still visibly settling in the distance by the time he had sprung to his feet to look, he estimated it was a few hours' walk away.

Over in one of the test subject storage areas.

He glanced down at his watch. He'd been sleeping for about five hours.

He stretched, stifled a yawn, picked up his bag, and started moving.

The subjects had all probably been dead for years, of course, but...

Michael had always been an optimist. Positive thinking had got him pretty far in life.

Up to a point.

-

He was in a sideways building full of dead people and he was pretty sure he was going crazy.

The quiet bothered him more than it should have. It wasn't just that it gave him space to think and that this tended to lead to disturbing questions such as _Where even am I?_ and _What's my last name?_ and _Why do I keep remembering screaming and fire but not the town I grew up in?_

It was that the quiet was never _silence_. All around him, all the time, were the sounds of structural failure – beams creaking and trapped air banging and metal shrieking. And he could hear it, all of it, not _loudly_ – but _perfectly_. He knew the sounds were normal, but he wasn't perceiving them normally.

At first he told himself that it was the isolation getting to him. There was no one to talk to or listen to, so he was hyperaware of every noise, however small or far off.

After an hour of humming a song he didn't know the lyrics to and realizing that it was a good thing he'd gone left because – _**creeeeeeaaaAAAAkkk –**_ the right side of the building – _**taptaptaptaptaptapBANG**_ – was about to collapse, he abandoned this theory and decided that the building was just really freaking weird.

Weird and sideways and full of dead people.

And –

 _ **snapcrackcrackcrackcrackclickclickFWOOM** – _ he threw himself down and covered his head with his arms a second before the wall would have lurched beneath his feet and sent him flying –

falling apart.


	4. Theoretical Optimism

“No. Way.”

Michael blinked down at the screen, wondering if the device had finally gone on the fritz. He shook it. The display remained the same.

_LIFE READING: **POSITIVE**_

_Life signs indicate **1** living being in immediate area other than operator._

_Species: Human_

_Biological Sex: Male_

_Status: Healthy, conscious, modified_

_Stationary/ **Moving**_

_State of Mind: Current reading of brain waves indicates that the **male human** is **confused** and **terrified** , and would thus be a good choice for Experiments #625, #753, and #115-#124._

“I. No. No way. Oh my god.”

Michael was an optimist.

But it had been _so_ _long_ since something good had happened. His positivity had become more of a default character trait that he constantly reminded himself of than an actual way of thinking. He kept moving each day because he was an optimist. He kept breathing because he was an optimist. He pressed the button on the life scanner because he was an optimist.

“Oh my _god_.” He pressed a hand over his mouth and shook with hysterical laughter, tears pricking at his eyes.

Then he shoved the life scanner into his bag, set the bag carefully on the ground, and ran full tilt at the gaping hole in the roof of the collapsed building.

-

Steve had hit a wall.

A ceiling, actually.

The hallway behind him was shaking and rumbling. It would collapse in a little over a minute.

He looked around wildly, trembling with currently useless adrenaline – he was not going to die, not _now_ , not after climbing out of that room, not without knowing why he was even here.

Not cornered and helpless.

He took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down.

_Think._

He scanned the walls, the floor, the ceiling -

There.

A vent.

It was about six inches above eye level in the wall to his left, and looked just big enough to let him through.

It was also covered by a metal grate that was screwed to the wall.

_**crickcrickBAM** _

_45_ _seconds._

He pulled his boot off and bashed it against the grate – once, twice, again.

On the sixth hit, it bent inwards. On the eighth, it broke.

_20 seconds._

Steve threw the boot into the vent and hauled himself up and through, only stopping to breathe once he felt his feet clear the opening.

_10 seconds._

The vent was barely big enough to move in.

“Hope I'm not claustrophobic,” he muttered, and crawled forward on his elbows.

**_FWOOM_ **

The room collapsed behind him.

He grabbed his boot and kept crawling.

-

Michael was starting to wish he'd brought the life scanner with him. The building was collapsing further and further in on itself, and the odds of this guy surviving were getting slimmer by the second.

“He's probably already dead,” Michael muttered, digging the rubble out of a door halfway up a wall. “Don't know why I'm getting my hopes up. This is a waste of time.”

He cleared the last of the metal scraps and plasterboard out of the doorway and pulled himself up and through.

Michael was an optimist.

-

So he probably wasn't claustrophobic.

But this still sucked. A lot.

He could hear rooms and hallways falling apart all around him, and he knew if anything directly above him were to give out, he'd have no way to escape it.

He gritted his teeth and kept moving.

The vent split in three directions up ahead of him. The air sounded different coming in from the path on the right – there was an opening not far off.

**_tickcreaktickcrackCRACK_ **

Not to mention the room above the path leading straight ahead was about to fall on top of it.

And the one on the left led to some sort of furnace. He didn't need any sort of freaky superhearing to know that – the heat rolling through in choking waves was enough.

He went right.

The opening was only a few feet ahead.

He paused.

Something about the way things were moving in the room up ahead wasn't right.

He huffed a laugh.

Right. As opposed to the rest of this, which all made _perfect sense_.

He threw the boot through the opening and grinned when he heard it hit solid ground.

“Awesome.”

He pulled himself through, narrowly avoided landing on his face, looked around for his boot, and nearly had a heart attack because somebody was holding it.

He blinked. “Uh.”

The stranger dropped the boot and pulled him into a startlingly tight hug. “OHMYGOD YOU'RE ALIVE!”

“I – yeah. I guess.”

The man let go of him and bounced a couple of steps back, looking him up and down and smiling impossibly wide. “Oh my god.”

“You said that already.”

“Sorry. It's been a few months since I've seen another person. Well. Years, actually, but I wasn't awake for that part.” He stuck his hand out. “I'm Michael, by the way. Michael Reed.”

Steve shook his hand. “Steve. I think.”


	5. Cheer Up

Michael talked a lot.

This was fine with Steve, who didn't have much to say – outside of things like “Where are we?” and “Why did my hands magically heal themselves?” and “What did you mean by _years_?”

“We're in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, or what's left of it. You were a test subject. No telling what they've done to you. Well, actually, we probably can tell, if I can get that function of my scanner to work. I'm a scientist. Used to work here, but I started objecting to some of the methods and experiments so they put me in an induced coma. Then I guess the company went bust, or something. Nobody ever bothered to tell me. I woke up because my sedation ran out before my life support. Oh – your hands were probably me, by the way. I created a self-sustaining, self-replicating, air-based version of the life support I was on and dispersed it throughout the base, just in case anyone else was still down here and alive. I think I went a little overboard – fell off a catwalk and broke my leg a couple weeks after I woke up; it healed in like... a night. Weird. And I haven't had to pee _at all_ , which is good, because I don't think there are any working bathrooms down here. Anyway. The life support that was keeping all of the test subjects alive has been failing for a long time – I checked all the buildings I passed myself before I got the scanner working. _Lots_ of dead people. Horrifying. Your life support system must have been one of the last to run out, so you were still alive when mine started up. You're really lucky, actually. If you were still asleep before the building collapsed, you must have still been under sedation. Falling must have brought you out of it – plus the building falling over would have broken whatever part of the system was still pumping the sedative into your room, and it tends to thin out pretty fast when it isn't being constantly replenished. Still. The shock of waking up straight out of it like that should have killed you. _And_ the doors aren't supposed to open like you said yours did. It must have been faulty. You were in the perfect room.”

“...Right,” Steve said, and pushed away the memory of what he had seen in the last room he had checked. “Why don't I remember anything?”

Michael shrugged. He was leaning back against his bag of rescued scientific equipment, staring up towards a ceiling that was too far away to see. Steve sat cross-legged and fiddled with the zippers on his jumpsuit. He felt like they should be sitting around a campfire.

“You were unconscious for years, and they were probably messing with your head before that. It does things to people.”

“Oh.”

“Like I said, once I get the scanner fully functional again, I should be able to tell what all they did to you. You seem pretty normal, though.”

Steve swallowed, looking at the ground. “...I think they did something to my sense of hearing.”

“Yeah?”

“I – I can hear... everything. Um... _really_ well. But only if it's already _almost_ loud enough to hear, I think. Like – ” He held his hands out in front of him in stalled gesticulation, trying to put into words something that didn't make sense even to him. “ – when I was trying to get out, I could tell which parts of the building were about to collapse. And when I was crawling through the vents, I knew something was different about the room you were in, before I got there, but I couldn't – I think everything else was too loud to really hear what it was, so I didn't really think about it, but if the place hadn't been falling apart I think I would have been able to tell there was... a human being in that room. And right now, I can... I can hear both our heartbeats. Really clearly. And both of us breathing. And the blood moving through my body. It's like everything is magnified, but only a fraction, and what I _can_ hear, I hear... perfectly.”

He looked up. Michael was staring at him. “Dude. That is _awesome_.”

And suddenly it was. Suddenly it wasn't this strange and horrifying mystery, it wasn't a sign that he was going mad, it wasn't going to kill him, it wasn't a _problem_ – it was awesome. The mad scientist in the purple tank top had said so.

Which reminded him.

“What's with the outfit, man?”

“Hm? Oh. Uh. They took my lab coat and stuff when they knocked me out. This was what I was wearing under it.”

“...A purple tank top?”

“Yeah.”

“And bright green shorts.”

“Yeah.”

“And... running shoes?”

“Flip flops, actually. I took these off a dead guy. The socks, too.”

Steve let that sink in for a moment. “Um –”

“It might have been a woman, actually. It was a skeleton, so I couldn't tell. You're supposed to look at the pelvis to figure that out, but I already felt kind of creepy taking the shoes. I didn't really want to stare at their crotch, too.”

“Why did you _only_ take the shoes? ...And why were you wearing flip flops in the first place?”

Michael flashed him a grin. “They wouldn't let me wear crocs.”

Over the past hour or so, Steve had learned that pretending to laugh at Michael's jokes only encouraged him to wander further and further off track. He leveled an entirely unamused look at him and waited.

Michael's grin shrank, but didn't entirely disappear. “The project I was working on at the time didn't require a lot of movement. Kind of boring. I'd been making trouble about ethics and test subject mortality rates for a while, so they stuck me with the more theoretical stuff to try and keep me quiet. And I figured it would be a bad idea to run around out here without actual shoes. Nothing else really seemed _essential_ , and I didn't want to wear any more dead-person-clothes than I had to.”

“That made more sense than anything else you've told me since we met.”

“Yeah. It's all incredibly messed up and kind of terrible, I know. I try not to think about it.”

-

“Okay,” Michael said, turning a knob on the scanner. “It _should_ be working now. Sorry. This thing was broken when I found it, and I didn't see any point in repairing it beyond scanning for life functions unless I actually found somebody. And then I did. So.”

Michael rambled on, and Steve let him.

Michael was out of practice at talking to people. His only conversational partner since he'd woken up had been himself, and “I'm too polite to tell people to shut up. Even me. Sorry.”

He also apologized a lot.

“So anyway. Yeah. Here we go.”

The scanner gave a small hum and a nondescript _**beep**_ , barely distinguishable over the whirring of its inner workings. Steve wondered if Michael had heard it at all. Then he wondered if Michael could hear the whirring.

Then he stopped thinking about that.

Awesome, yes, but still weird and kind of scary.

“Hm.” Michael poked at the screen, frowning in concentration. “Yeah. They definitely... yeah. Wow.”

“What?”

“You were deaf for a while.”

Steve blinked. “What?”

“They completely recreated your entire auditory system – canal, ear drum, cochlea, _everything._ Removed it all and replaced it with synthetics. You're kind of a cyborg, bro.”

“ _What_? Why – that can't... Wouldn't I be able to hear _that_?”

Michael shook his head. “They programmed it not to detect itself.”

The words _programmed_ and _it_ were doing unpleasant things to Steve's head and stomach and nerves and, just, really, every part of him that was capable of registering emotion or physical sensation. He sat down.

Michael followed suit, looking cautious and puzzled. “Are you okay?”

“Great.”

“It's not dangerous, if that's what you're worried about.”

“I wasn't.”

“Okay.”

“I'm a freak,” Steve said, mostly because he wasn't entirely sure what was bothering him but he thought maybe that should have been it and he hoped saying it out loud might trigger something so he could deal with it.

It didn't.

Michael's brow furrowed. “You're a test subject. Well, you were. They could have done a lot worse.”

“I guess.” Steve stared at the ground and listened to the blood pounding in his ears and his heart beating out of sync with Michael's, which was jarringly fast, and wished he'd thought earlier that this was all a dream that he was going to wake up from, because that would have been a nice thing to hope for, for at least a little while, and he was pretty sure he was past the point of believing it now.

Michael reached over and clapped him on the arm. “Hey. Cheer up. You're alive.”

“Yeah.”

“Steve...” Michael trailed off, going quieter than he had been in the entirety of the day and a half Steve had known him.

And then his face lit up. He'd thought of something. Steve could almost see the lightbulb.

“Hey! You wanna see what I have in the bag?”

And despite himself, Steve smiled. “Yeah, sure.”


	6. Now You're Thinking with System Errors

What Michael had in the bag was some of the weirdest stuff Steve had ever seen – and in the relatively short span of time his memory had to work with, he'd seen a lot of weird stuff.

“I don't actually know what this thing does, but it looked fun... Don't touch it.” The device was grey and sharp and utterly silent, and looked upside down no matter which way Michael turned it. The thought of touching it hadn't even remotely occurred to Steve as an _idea_ , let alone a good one. Michael set it aside and pulled out the next device – and then the next one, and the next one, and Steve realized he was drawing connections to Mary Poppins and her carpet bag and wondered again at his apparent ability to recollect pop culture and little else.

“This is a high energy pellet launcher. Definitely don't touch that. Old turret sentry and a couple packs of resolution pellets. Don't touch those. Dismantled science bomb – really _really_ don't touch that. Aaaaaand a couple of portal guns.”

Steve waited a moment, and then raised an eyebrow. “You're not gonna tell me not to touch that?”

Michael only smiled wider. “Nah, they're harmless. Well. As long as you use them right. Here, I'll show you.” And before Steve could protest that he really wasn't sure he wanted a demonstration of something that was provisionally harmless, Michael pulled out two pairs of what looked like ridiculously complex pieces of footwear, but which Steve was prepared to find out were actually pretty much anything.

“What are those?”

“Long Fall Boots. Here.” He handed a pair to Steve.

Steve looked at them. They didn't _seem_ dangerous. “Uh.”

Michael was already taking his shoes and socks off and pulling the other set of boots on. Steve sighed and followed suit, figuring that if Michael was going to kill him he would have done it by now.

“I think it's too s– … um...” As he spoke, the boot started reforming itself around his foot. “...Never mind.”

Michael grinned at him. “Cool, huh?”

“Yeah,” Steve said faintly, staring down at his feet as the second boot adjusted itself.

“Okay. I'll show you how it works first,” said Michael, hefting one of the guns. “This one's mine. I modified the portal colors and stuff when I got bored one day, but I haven't had much of a reason to actually use it. See that white wall over there?”

Steve looked. “No.”

“Higher,” Michael prompted. Steve looked up. There was, in fact, a stretch of white wall – hundreds of feet up.

“Uh.”

“And see how the floor here is white?”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty much any white surface in here is a portal surface. They're made of moon rocks.”

Steve blinked. “Okay.”

Michael grinned wider. Steve's face was starting to hurt just looking at him. “Okay. Here's where it gets awesome.”

He pointed the gun at the ground a few feet away and fired.

There was a noise like knives sharpening on an uncoiling spring, and Steve flinched before he could help it.

When he looked up, there was a swirling purple oval on the ground.

“...Michael, what the hell?”

“It's a portal!”

“I. To _where_?”

“Nowhere. Yet.” So saying, Michael turned and fired at the white expanse of wall.

The shot hit as a pink dot and expanded into another oval, and the portal on the ground was suddenly showing them a bird's eye view of the cavernous laboratory.

Steve shrugged, reluctantly impressed. “I guess that's pretty MICHAEL _NO_ –”

But Michael had already jumped straight into the portal, catching the edge of the floor with his fingers as he dangled hundreds of feet up in the air.

Through the ground.

Steve shook his head and leaned as close to the opening as he deemed not completely stupid. “What the hell are you doing?!”

“This is where the Long Fall Boots come in!” Michael said gleefully, and wow, yeah, his voice was coming from close up and far away at the same time, which the synthetics in Steve's head apparently did not appreciate, because it _hurt_.

He winced, took a deep breath, and stuck his head as far through the portal as he dared, keeping a tight hold on the edge. “ _What_?”

And that was – so much worse. So much _infinitely_ worse, especially when Michael replied, because their voices were now coming from up close and far away _twice_ and Steve thought his head was going to explode.

He jerked away back through the portal and landed flat on his back, gasping for breath.

When he looked up, Michael was falling.

Steve watched in a sort of horrified stupor as Michael plummeted, picking up speed, and –

landed on his feet and jogged back over to ask if Steve was okay.

Steve blinked. “I'm – fine. What was – how did you – is _that_ what the boots are for?”

Michael nodded. “Yeah! Wanna try?”

He really, really didn't.

“Sure.”

-

“This is the most idiotic thing I have ever done in my life. Probably,” Steve muttered, looking down through the blue portal on the ground at the top of his own head.

They had found a platform the top of which they could actually _see_ , and Michael had told Steve how the double triggers worked and what the different colors of the portals meant and assured him that this was absolutely the most fun you could have with a portal gun and that the Boots would keep him safe.

“Hop in!” Michael urged, looking entirely too excited for a bystander.

Steve almost rolled his eyes, but the idea of accidentally meeting his own gaze was not an appealing one.

He hopped in.

It _was_ fun, for the first few cycles, watching the floor rise up to meet him over and over again as he whooshed straight through it.

And then the whooshing became an actual sound, mixed in with his own breathing and heartbeat and every move he made and Michael's laughter and the portal gun whirring, and everything was coming at him from too many directions, all at once, from the same source twice, and he was picking up too much speed, the time between portals was hardly even a second, and there was no way a pair of freaking _boots_ was going to keep him from shattering every bone in his body and there was sound everywhere, too loud and intense and coming from the right place in the wrong direction and he couldn't _see –_

“ _Michael_!” he managed to shout. “Michael, I _don't_ _like_ _this_!”

Michael said something in response but he couldn't even begin to comprehend what it was. He was going to fall forever, and he wouldn't even starve to death because of Michael's stupid life support; this was going to get worse and worse until the synthetics in his head overloaded and killed him and _stop it_ , _Steve –_ think rationally – what had Michael said about firing more than two portals?

Which one had he fired at the ground? The orange one?

No – no, definitely the blue one. He hoped.

He raised the gun and aimed it up at the platform and fired –

– and landed on his feet, breathing hard, heart hammering against his ribcage like it wanted to get out of him before he did something even more ridiculous.

“Steve?” Michael was suddenly far too close, peering into his eyes and snapping his fingers impossibly loudly. “You okay, buddy?”

Steve stumbled away from him, trying to wave him off and almost overbalancing in the process. “Yeah, I'm – no. That was. Ow. No. _Ow_.”

Everything was far too loud. His vision was dim and he could hear a constant buzzing noise, thrumming vibrations, like he had fallen asleep on top of a motor. “I think I broke it," he said thickly, the sound of his own voice like trying to swallow tar. "The – the thing. In my head.”

Michael's face lost all color. “ _Shit._ ohshitohshitohshit I'm sorry; I didn't even _think_ about that – okay, it – it probably just overloaded – lie down and don't move and – and I'll shut up, sorry, and it should be okay soon.”

It was.

Steve sat up after a couple of minutes, and everything looked fine, and sounded only as strange as it had before the portals.

“I think I'm okay.”

Michael hugged him. Steve rolled his eyes and waited it out.

“I'm sorry!” Michael said again as he pulled away, looking miserable. “That was really stupid; I should have thought about the conflicting sound sources; I –”

Steve held up a hand. _“Dude._ Stop. I'm fine. I'm the one who jumped through the damn thing, and I already knew something was wrong. If you beat yourself up every time I do something stupid, your freaky life support stuff is gonna have its hands full keeping you from turning black and blue.”

Michael huffed a quiet laugh, and managed a less blinding version of his usual smile. “Right. Okay. We should, uh – we should get moving.”

“Where to?”

Michael shrugged. “Anywhere I haven't already been. There still might be other people.”

“Cool.”


	7. Sleep

Michael’s bag of dangerous science stuff was heavy and cumbersome, and Steve carried it for him every chance he got. He liked being able to do something tangibly useful, and he appreciated the idea of getting at least some form of exercise. Michael’s thoughts seemed to run in a similar direction, so the bag spent about an equal amount of time slung over each of their shoulders.

About five days (by Michael’s watch, which there was really no point in questioning) after the incident with the portals, it occurred to Steve to ask him where he’d got the bag. It was large and brown and probably burlap, and would have looked more at home in the back of a reindeer-drawn sleigh than in the bowels of a ruined scientific establishment.

The moment he asked the question, Michael’s whole demeanor shifted. He stopped moving and looked at the ground, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s, uh…” he said, and mumbled something that even Steve couldn’t make sense of.

“…What?”

Michael cleared his throat. “Um. It was… technically, a, uh… Test Subject Disposal Transportation Unit.”

Steve, very calmly, set the bag down and turned to face Michael.

“Michael,” he said, very,  _very_  calmly. “Is that a dressed-up, rocket-scientist way of saying  _body bag_?”

“Not – Aperture doesn’t deal  _exclusively_ with rockets, but… Yes.”

“…Was there a body  _in_ it when you found it?”

“No.”

“Has there  _ever_  been a body in it?”

“…Probably. I, um. I cleaned it. Chemical washed it and – and stuff.”

Steve steepled his fingers and brought his hands to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose and letting the idea settle for a few seconds. He sighed. “…Okay.” He picked the bag back up and kept walking. After a moment, he heard Michael start to follow him.

They switched places pretty soon after that, seeing as Michael was the only one with any idea of where they were actually going.

-

Some sort of structure had collapsed in the middle of the floor, blocking their path as far as they could see in either direction. Michael took it more or less in stride, and was in the middle of asking Steve which way he wanted to go when Steve held up a hand to quiet him.

The ruins directly in front of them formed what was  _almost_  a path – a straight shot clear of the more shattered debris, full of metal plating and pipes, and something in Steve’s head sparked.

“…Hold this.” He handed Michael the bag, backed up for a running start, and leapt into the rubble.

His feet hit metal and he bent his knees and propelled himself up to an overhanging pipe, swinging forward and to the next solid surface. He hit, looked, calculated, ran, and jumped again.

He didn’t know what he was doing, but whatever it was, he was out of practice at it. He overbalanced in the air and for a heart-stopping instant he  _knew_  he was about to knock his teeth out on rusted metal, but the Long Fall Boots corrected his position and he landed on his feet, breathing hard but grinning.

All things considered, he was glad he hadn’t bothered taking the Boots off. And that Michael had altered them to work for shorter falls after he’d broken his leg on the catwalk.

“Dude!”

He turned – and stopped, blinked, and laughed.

Michael had clambered up after him – more slowly but also  _almost_  more impressively, considering he was still carrying the bag.

Steve stretched his arms wide and proclaimed triumphantly, “Parkour!”

Michael slid down a pile of rust and not much else, using the bag as a sled, and finally joined him. “Par…  _what_?”

Steve dropped his arms and shrugged. “The name and how to do it are… literally the only things I can remember about it.”

Michael smiled a smile that was different from his default smile, which meant he was, outside of being somehow delighted at life in general, delighted about some particularly delightful thing especially. “That is  _awesome_! Can you teach me?”

-

It was obvious fairly early on that Michael had no idea what he was doing.

But he was athletic and determined and impossible to discourage, and by the end of the day they were both exhausted but laughing.

Steve lay flat on his back and stared up at the darkness and enjoyed the fading ache in his muscles and the weariness clouding his thoughts.

Previous nights, they had grown gradually tired, their bodies simply needing recharging after meeting the minimal demands of walking and talking and being awake. Sleep was difficult, even for Michael, who had had months of practice. The life support in the air lent them enough energy that they could have stayed awake probably forever, but they would have existed in a half-conscious state of sluggishness and low comprehension that Steve could feel himself slipping into at the end of each day.

Tonight, his limbs and back and sides were burning and his mind was muffled with a true tiredness that was deep enough to  _nearly_  block out all the distracting noises that usually kept him awake after Michael stopped talking.

Not that Michael ever  _really_  stopped talking. Even in sleep, he murmured nonsense under his breath, indistinct ramblings absent of any real syllables, combining almost sickeningly with the noises of the environment and adding to a quiet cacophony that always made Steve want to scream just to drown it all out.

Michael was already asleep, curled up on his side with his back to the body bag full of science.

And, for once, completely silent – except for his heartbeat and his breathing, both slower than usual.

Steve shut his eyes and listened to his own heartbeat, his own breathing – listened to the blood coursing through his body in a way he was slowly training himself to find reassuring rather than unnerving.

He fell asleep.


	8. Ethics and Morality

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to take this opportunity to make it known that this is not and will never be a shipping fic okay bye

When he woke up, all that registered at first was a searing pain in his head.

He shouted, which made it worse, and sat up, and looked around for Michael so he could demand answers –

and froze.

Michael was screaming.

And apparently still asleep.

The synthetics adjusted slightly, and as the noise became annoying rather than actually unbearable and blinding, Steve scrambled over to Michael and tried to shake him awake.

He nearly received a black eye for his efforts. He ducked out of the way and pulled back, trying a different tactic.

“Michael! Wake up!”

That only seemed to make things worse. Michael kicked out at nothing and thrashed wildly, the back of his head connecting with the floor with a sickening crack as he continued to scream. He wasn’t even forming  _words._

Steve gritted his teeth and launched himself forward, pinning Michael’s arms down with his knees and one hand and trying to hold his head still with the other. “ _Michael_!”

Michael came awake with a gasp and a strangled yelp, throwing Steve off and rolling away from him.

For several seconds, they stared at each other – eyes wide, hearts pounding.

Michael raised a hand to the back of his head and winced. “Ow.”

-

Michael didn’t want to talk about it, which was perhaps the most worrying aspect of the whole thing, because Michael had once talked for two hours about why purple was his favorite color (a question which Steve hadn’t asked and which he still didn’t understand the answer to).

After assuring Steve that his head was  _fine_  and that even if he had seriously injured himself it wouldn’t last long, Michael had picked up the bag and started walking. Eventually, Steve had followed.

He felt like he was being a bad friend or maybe even just a bad person in general by not asking any questions or at least making the obligatory offer of a sympathetic (and synthetic) ear, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good.

For one thing, he wouldn’t have any idea what he was doing. For another thing, he had a feeling Michael would just… keep walking.

So when Michael started talking about fish and trees and science that Steve would never understand and how he wished they had music to listen to down here, Steve was only too happy to nod along and interject whenever he felt smart enough.

Michael had worked for Aperture up until some point in the late eighties, and Steve thought he must have been at least  _alive_  at around the same time, because they had a lot of songs in common. The laboratory was dark and endless and when they were both singing at the top of their lungs it echoed like ripples in a pond and Steve thought briefly of kids’ movies and diamond mines. The thought stuck in the back of his head and refused to explain itself.

Sometime around the middle of the day, Michael stopped walking, stood stock still for a moment, and then turned to Steve with such a crazed look in his eye that Steve started to back away. “Michael…?”

“We can get out!”

“What?”

“There’s two of us! You’re a test subject! We – we can get out of here!”

As with many things Michael said, Steve gave himself a moment to see if it made any more sense after his brain had processed it a couple of times.

It did not.

“What?”

“There’s – there are these testing chambers, they should still be active, and there’s an elevator up to the surface on the other side. Even if it’s broken, I could probably fix it! Some of the chambers you can’t get through without at least two people, and it would never take me alone anyway because I’m not registered as a test subject, so I haven’t even tried it, but – you – if it scans you, it should let me in as – I don’t know, an observer or something, and –” – he took Steve by the shoulders and  _shook_  him – “–  _we can_ _ **get out**_!”

Steve was seeing spots. He grabbed hold of Michael’s arms and pushed him, politely but firmly, away. “Michael – that – how do you even know about that?”

“Oh!” Michael tapped the side of his head. “I’m kind of a cyborg, too!”

“…What?”

“I’ve got this – map, sort of…  _thing_  in my head, of the entire facility – had it implanted forever ago because I used to be working on like six projects at once and they were always moving stuff around. It was programmed to update itself every time the layout changed, and it kept going while I was unconscious. They must have forgotten about it or just not cared.”

The spots had gone, but Steve’s head was spinning. He  _could not_ let himself just be  _happy_  about this, because then it would only suck even more when it was taken away. “Okay. We… okay. …You said there might be other people down here.”

Michael’s face fell. “Well… yeah. There… there might be.”

“Right.”

They stood without speaking, issues of ethics and morality fluttering around them like moths. Steve felt suddenly very small in the vast darkness.

Michael snapped his fingers. “I forgot – there’s a master computer terminal about a week and a half’s walk that way.” He pointed. “If I can get it up and running, we can do a full sweep of the facility. If anyone’s alive, we’ll know it.”

Steve blinked. “Why didn’t you do that in the first place instead of checking every building yourself?”

Michael shrugged, looking at the ground in a way that Steve had come to recognize as signifying that the current topic was not among his favorites. “I was… afraid of the answer. If I checked  _one_  holding facility and there was nobody there, I could move on to the next one. If I did a full scan and it came up empty, that was… That would be it. But you’re – I mean, I know I’m not  _completely_  alone now, so…” He trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck.

Steve clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Come on. Let’s see how far we can run before we hit something dangerous.”

Neither of them could remember all the words to  _Livin’ on a Prayer_ , but the chorus crashed into itself on the far off walls like waves breaking at the shoreline.

Steve would let himself hope, for a while.


	9. I Know

_LIFE READING: **NEGATIVE**_

_Life signs indicate **0** living beings in immediate area other than operator and specified exception._

_Better luck next time._

Steve stared at the screen, his mind utterly blank. The notice had been preceded by a tauntingly innocuous _**blip**_ _._

_**Blip** _

_Everyone is dead_

Michael was already putting the scanner back in the bag, apparently unfazed and ready to move on.

Shaking his head, Steve stopped staring at the empty air where the screen had been and switched to staring at the frankly enormous building.

Everyone in it was dead. Everyone in most of the other buildings was probably dead. Hundreds of thousands of people – human beings reduced to piles of bones, crumbling to dust in the dark, swallowed by orange jumpsuits, years after anyone might have missed them.

Hundreds of thousands of families destroyed – lovers left alone, friends and parents and children and siblings and cousins left waiting, coworkers and neighbors shrugging and moving on and maybe occasionally wondering what had happened to Sophie from accounting or that nice man who lived at the end of the block.

Steve suddenly realized that half of what his memory dredged up was children's entertainment – Mary Poppins and diamond mines and The Wizard of Oz and maybe if he concentrated he could remember a small voice calling him _Uncle_ , if he wasn't imagining it.

He was shaking, his head was spinning, he was going to be _sick_ –

“I know,” Michael said quietly, and put a hand on his shoulder, turning him away from the broken-down structure and making him sit.

Steve dropped his head into his hands and listened to his own breathing, ragged and loud and too fast. Michael's hand was a grounding weight on his back as he sat beside him.

“I know,” he repeated, voice low. “Sorry. I... sort of forgot what it felt like the first time. Well. The first time _I_... I didn't have the scanner working yet, so I checked all the rooms myself, and then I walked back outside and threw up, and then I screamed for a while. It's... It's messed up. And then you think about... all the others, and, just, yeah – I know. You gonna be okay?”

Steve nodded, but didn't move. “I don't,” he said, and then cleared his throat and started again. “I don't remember if I had a family.”

He heard Michael pull in a sharp, startled breath, and continued swiftly because if Michael cut him off now he would _let_ him, and he would never talk about this, and maybe he would actually prefer that but one of them having screaming nightmares was enough. “I was thinking... of – all these people, all the people who probably missed them – some of them, at least. I mean. A lot of'em probably didn't – have anybody; you guys probably... Sorry. Not – not you. They... probably looked for people without connections, right? But if... someone needed money or was curious or just... thought it sounded like a good idea... Someone might have – missed them. And then I thought... I don't – Someone might have missed me. But I don't... know. I don't even know.”

Steve didn't mind this hug nearly as much as he had the last one.

They moved on. Neither of them sang.

-

The next four buildings were negative. Steve started singing, and Michael, who had been unbelievably quiet since their conversation earlier in the day, seemed to take it as permission and joined in with an air of relief.

The fifth and sixth buildings yielded the same results. Michael apologized again and said there were only three more on the way to the computer terminal. They slept. They woke up and kept walking and after the seventh building they had run out of songs they both knew and Michael was in the middle of teaching Steve how to sing the alphabet backwards when they reached the eighth building and the scanner _**blip**_ ped and said _positive._

Steve was floating. He couldn't feel anything and the blood was pounding in his ears too loudly to think. He swallowed. “Is it – are you sure?”

Wordlessly, Michael handed the scanner over.

_LIFE READING: **POSITIVE**_

_Life signs indicate **1** living being in immediate area other than operator and specified exception._

_Species: Human_

_Biological Sex: Male_

_Status: Healthy, unconscious, modified_

_**Stationary** /Moving_

_State of Mind: Current reading of brain waves indicates that the **male human** is **unconscious**. Induce consciousness for a reasonably accurate brain wave reading._

Steve looked up. “Dude.”

“I know.” Michael had bypassed _happy_ and zipped straight into _ecstatic_. His grin was both terrifying and infectious.

Steve laughed only slightly hysterically. “ _Dude_.”

“I know!”

They ran inside.

-

Finding the right room was easy enough – the scanner led them right to it. Getting in wasn't too much of a problem, either. Michael pulled a toolbox out of the bag and had the door open in a matter of minutes.

Waking the guy up was another story.

“I wasn't exaggerating when I said you should have died,” Michael said. “People aren't supposed to just _wake_ _up_ from this sort of sedation. You're basically a miracle. We'll have to be careful here.”

 _Being careful_ , as it turned out, meant tracing the source of the sedation back to a main pump room, breaking in, slowly turning the pressure down lower and lower until it was completely nonfunctional, and running back to the room as fast as they could so the man in the bed wouldn't completely freak out.

He was already awake and waiting to bash them over the head with the desk chair when they reached him.

Steve caught the chair and Michael apologized and introduced himself and started explaining things far too quickly for any human being to comprehend. Steve put a hand over his mouth and said, “Hi. I'm Steve. This is Michael. He talks a lot, but he's a genius. I have amnesia but I can do this thing called Parkour which is pretty awesome. We're escaping. What's your name, if you remember it, and are you in?”

“...Sam. Sam Luke. And sure. I guess.”


	10. Trust

“What's your favorite color?” Michael asked, the picture of polite, innocent excitement.

Sam glanced down at his jumpsuit. “Orange,” he said shortly, and walked away.

An hour later, the second portal gun shot one portal of the original orange color and another of a darker, almost red hue. Michael handed it over almost shyly.

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Thanks.”

“Do you know how to –”

“The knee replacements aren't decorative.”

“Right. I... Yeah. Right. Sorry. I'll just, um... Steve! What was that thing we were talking about?”

“Which thing, Michael?” Steve said, doing his best not to thunk his head against the closest wall.

Sam did not trust Michael – more to the point, he didn't _like_ him, and it was breaking Michael's heart. Steve felt like he was watching a soap opera. (At this point, he had pretty much given up on asking himself questions like _Why do I know enough about soap operas to draw comparisons to them?_ )

Sam had been a test subject for a long time, and he remembered all of it. The revelation that Michael was a scientist had sparked an instant coldness and opened a rift between the two of them that only seemed to widen with Michael's every attempt to bridge it.

With Michael and himself, friendship had been instantaneous – out of necessity if nothing else. Steve hadn't known who or where he was or why, or what was going on in his head, or even if anything he was experiencing was real. Michael had been completely isolated for months. The idea that either of them might run into another human being and _not_ immediately latch on and form some sort of bond was laughable.

Sam, it seemed, could very much take or leave human companionship – especially theirs, and especially Michael's.

-

It took roughly four days for the whole thing to progress from amusing to annoying to depressing.

After a week and a half, when it had become apparent that the problem was not going to solve itself, Steve decided to speak up on Michael's behalf.

Sam refused to go to sleep before Michael did, and Steve was usually the last one awake whether he wanted to be or not. He waited until he was sure Michael had slipped from the awkward fake snooze he'd adopted since Sam had joined their party into actual sleep.

Sam was sitting up, arms folded – and watching Michael so intently that Steve forgot the half-formed speech he'd been trying vaguely to plan, and laughed. “He's not gonna _pounce_ , man.”

“You don't know that.”

“He's asleep.” Steve tapped the side of his head. “Trust me.”

Sam _did_ trust him, a fact which Steve had yet to puzzle out. Maybe it was the jumpsuit. Surely no self-respecting Aperture scientist would ever willingly don such a garment, even for the sake of disguise.

Steve cleared his throat. “We, um. We should...”

“You're here to tell me I'm misjudging him and you'd like me to stop hurting his feelings.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Save it.”

“...I was also gonna say something about how it's probably dangerous for any of us to be angry at each other if we plan on working together to get out.”

“I'm not angry at anybody.”

Whatever Steve had been in his past life, he was pretty sure it wasn't any sort of counsellor. He was already irritated. “Michael's a good guy. We'd both be dead if not for him.”

Sam shrugged. “So he says.”

Steve huffed a sigh that was very nearly a growl and dropped into a crouch, jabbing a finger into Sam's ribs. “ _Look_ –”

Sam blinked at him, singularly unimpressed. His mustache twitched.

Steve faltered. He took a deep breath and sat down. “Look,” he said again, more quietly though perhaps not actually more calmly. “He _is_ a good guy. That's the whole reason he's down here in the first place. Aperture _attacked_ him because he had more moral integrity than the rest of them put together.”

“And you just take his word for that.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don't – because... He looks for survivors, and he sings AC/DC and Bon Jovi and Queen, and – just – look at his _clothes_. He just doesn't really scream _evil mastermind_ to me, I guess. I don't know. Why do you trust _me_?”

“Because you look like a test subject.”

“This thing?” Steve plucked unhappily at the jumpsuit. “I mean, it's _awful_ , but if I really wanted to trick you –”

But Sam shook his head. “Not the outfit. There's a _look_ we all have, once we've been here long enough. Hunted – haunted – _angry._ Calculating. Always ready to figure out the next puzzle. You may not remember any of it, but _something_ in your brain does. You have the look.”

“...If you say so, dude.”

Sam nodded over at Michael. “But him?” He shook his head again. “He just looks... crazy. And that's practically a requirement if you want to work here. For all I know, this whole thing is another experiment. And thinking that – being _prepared_ for that – is the only way I can protect myself. Because the _second_ you let your guard down in some way they don't actually _want_ you to is the second they get bored and throw something else at you – literally or not –, or the second they decide you've failed, or the _experiment_ has failed, and put you back to bed.”

Sam picked up the portal gun that had become his, regarding it with an inscrutable expression. “I don't like being a lab rat – but I do like being awake, and I plan to stay that way as long as possible.” He met Steve's gaze and held it. “I'm glad you trust him. Go ahead – believe he's your friend, if it makes you happy. Believe he cares about you. But I _can't_.”

It took Steve a longer time than usual to fall asleep that night.


	11. Oh

For a little over a week, Steve and Michael had been each other's only company - the only living, conscious human beings in a dank, dark, horrible world - and somehow, it hadn't been awkward.

Now they had a third person, something which by all accounts should have been cause for wild celebration, and somehow the group's default state had drifted slowly into embarrassed, vaguely pissed off silence.

Sam quietly distrusted Michael and Steve quietly tried not to hate him for it, because the revelation of Sam's life experience as a test subject had been horrifying and Steve liked to think he was capable of letting profoundly unsettling things change his mindset at least a little bit, but it was difficult to keep that in mind when Michael was walking around like a kicked dog, eyes downcast, mumbling to himself more than actually _talking_ to anyone else, apologizing if he so much as coughed, and making such pathetic noises in his sleep that Steve almost wished for the screaming.

Singing was obviously out of the question.

When Steve finally shoved all the awkwardness aside and suggested it, because something was dripping a few miles away and it was driving him crazy, Sam gave him a look that Steve was starting to hate because he was pretty sure it meant Sam was both judging and pitying him. And then he didn't know any of the songs that Steve and Michael knew, and Michael's sheepish suggestion that Sam might be from a different decade brought the stony silence back with a vengeance.

Five minutes later, the dripping stopped.

Which didn't make sense. It hadn't faded with distance as they walked, which Steve was used to – it had _stopped_.

And there was something else – something _moving_.

Steve froze. “Guys. There's - there's something... I don't know. I don't know what it is. But it's this way."

And he strode off, dimly aware that the feeling coursing through him was more excitement than fear - something was _happening_.

For ten minutes, Steve followed the sound and the others followed Steve, footsteps echoing and light vanishing as they progressed. When it was nearly pitch black, a beam of light wavered into view, not so much cutting the darkness as hesitantly pushing it aside.

“Sorry,” Michael whispered, and Steve glanced back to see that he had pulled a vaguely flashlight-shaped object out of the bag. “Thought it might help.”

“Just don't shine it in my face,” Sam muttered, moving ahead. Steve glared at him, nodded at Michael, and continued on, the narrow shaft of light barely even registering. The sounds were much sharper, much easier to process – footsteps bouncing back off potential obstacles, echoes rising up the walls into nothing, movement and machines a constant from somewhere up ahead.

“I'm a freaking bat,” Steve realized, and, somewhat to his surprise, discovered he was quite pleased with the development. As far as these things went, sonar seemed like an okay tradeoff for portal difficulties and lost sleep.

“I can hear it,” Sam said, voice sharp – calculating. He moved ahead of the other two, stepping carefully, _thinking_ carefully. Ready for the challenge.

Steve swallowed.

“Michael? What's the scanner say?”

There was a quietly resounding _**clunk**_ that Steve knew was the flashlight being laid gently on the ground, the bag rustled, and the whirring of the scanner started up.

_**Blip** _

“Life reading negative,” said Michael, nerves creeping into his voice and starting to strangle it. “There's no one here.”

The scanner stopped whirring.

Something else didn't.

Something that was suddenly and deliberately _not_ moving, holding still in a way that wasn't natural, couldn't be – Steve was standing as still as he possibly could and he could still hear his own breathing, clothes rustling, feet sliding on the damp incline of the floor.

_**Whir whir whir sssss whir whir whir sssss whir whir whir click SSSssss** _

Whatever this thing was, it was full of moving parts, but it was holding _itself_  still - _perfectly_ still.

It was hiding.

And it was about ten feet to Sam's left.

Steve felt numb all over.

He backed up. “Michael,” he said – quietly, calmly. “Hand me the flashlight.”

The weight in his hand was reassuring, as a solid weapon if nothing else.

He swung the beam to the source of the noise.

And stared.

“Ohmygod,” said Michael.

“ _What_ ,” said Steve.

“Oh,” said Sam. “Another robot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost titled this chapter "Steve Is a Freaking Bat."


	12. Just What We Need

“ _What_ ,” said Steve again, this time at Sam.

“Ohmygod,” said Michael again, still at the robot.

“Hi,” said the robot, and stuck out its hand. It opened its eyes and a green light bathed the scene, throwing everything into an eerie starkness.

“Ohmyg-”

“Michael, I will _kill_ you,” Steve hissed.

“Get that light out of my face,” Sam complained, and Steve realized belatedly that he had trained it directly on him when addressing him earlier. He shut it off.

Michael bounded forward and shook the robot's hand wildly.

The robot looked surprised.

Steve finally gave up on anything in his life ever making sense again.

“Ohmygod you're a _Walter bot,_ ” Michael bubbled, voice full of awe and wonderment – it was the happiest and most genuinely _Michael_ ish Steve had heard him sound in days.

“...Yes,” said the robot.

“Which one – I mean, sorry – What's your name?”

Steve glanced at Sam, who shrugged, looking just as confused as Steve felt. They were, for once, on the same page.

“I'm The Spine,” said the robot, and the nostalgia in its voice was so perfectly calibrated that Steve could almost hear the code running through it. “I was built with –”

“A titanium alloy spine!” Michael yipped. “Sorry – been a while since I read the files.”

“Michael,” Sam cut in, clearing his throat. “What the hell is going on?”

“Oh! Sorry. Um. Maybe he can explain better...”

“Maybe you should let go of his hand,” Steve pointed out, because really, at this point, what did he have to lose by assigning gendered pronouns to robots?

“Sorry.” Michael let go, and The Spine started to talk. His words had a distinct air of rehearsal about them.

“I was built in 1896 by Colonel Peter A. Walter I, to impress a woman and fellow scientist whom he wished to court. I was eventually sent into battle against clockwork elephants, and later utilized by the US military in World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. My core is infused with blue matter, a mysterious substance which isn't completely understood as of yet, but which has contributed to the apparently human personalities of myself and several other Walter automatons, most notably Rabbit and The Jon. ...I haven't had to give that speech in a while,” The Spine added, somewhat sheepishly. “How was it?”

“Great,” Steve said blankly. “Um. What are you doing down here?”

“Aperture was working on acquiring the Walter bots when I worked here,” Michael piped up, “but I was – um.”

“Attacked and forced into stasis?” Steve suggested, because tact was all well and good but his patience was wearing thin.

Michael's smile twitched briefly into a wince, but didn't disappear. “Yeah, _that_... before anything ever came of it.”

“You worked here?” The Spine's voice was suddenly more intense – not exactly _angry_ , but...

Calculating.

“Yeah,” Michael said, cautiously, and glanced at Sam. “I – I wouldn't have been around when you got here, so I don't know what... they did to you, but... I'm sorry.”

“How are you with machines?” The Spine asked, waving the apology aside impatiently.

“What?”

“Machines. Mechanics. Robots.”

“Oh. Um. Pretty good.”

“He's a genius,” Steve clarified.

The Spine nodded, looking Michael carefully up and down and staring into his face for so long that Steve began to feel uncomfortable on his behalf.

Finally, he seemed to reach a decision. “Come with me.” He turned and motioned for them to follow him. “There's someone I want you to meet.”

-

The Spine was sleek and silver and looked like he was supposed to be wearing clothes.

The concept of a robot being _naked_ had never occurred to Steve, at least not that he remembered, but The Spine had so obviously been designed to appear human that the lack of clothing was disconcerting.

He was tall and quick, and he moved more fluidly than any machine should have been able to. Everything connected smoothly – head to neck to shoulders to upper arm to elbow to forearm, hip to thigh to knee to shin to ankle –, his torso obviously on some sort of pivot as he occasionally turned his entire body further than any human could have to check that they were still following. His head didn't always turn back around at the same time as the rest of him.

Steve could hear a boiler somewhere in his chest cavity, steam puffing out into the air from his mouth and nose and joints every so often. The noise when it came out of the joints was strained, like it wasn't supposed to escape from there. He could also hear a low, almost imperceptible hum, which he decided for the moment to assume was the blue matter. Whatever the hell _that_ was.

The overall effect was fascinating – even though Steve was almost certain he hadn't known anything about robots in his past life, and he definitely couldn't appreciate the mechanics on the same level as someone who actually understood any of it.

Michael was practically salivating.

Sam had gone back to being quietly resigned and just going along with things because he had nothing better to do.

After about five minutes, Steve started to notice more noises – they had been there before, but The Spine had overridden them due to his proximity, and as the _**clunk**_ s and _**tick**_ s and tinny rattling rose to a comprehensible level, Steve finally registered what The Spine had said –

_There's someone I want you to meet._

The light from The Spine's eyes extended in a circle only a few feet around him, but Steve could hear that they were coming up on a wall.

The Spine turned to face them. “Wait here a moment,” he said quietly, mostly to Michael, then turned and left them in the dark. Steve tightened his grip on the flashlight, but didn't turn it back on.

The Spine's footsteps clanged and echoed and finally stopped.

“Rabbit,” The Spine said, voice low, and something crept up the back of Steve's neck because he was pretty sure Sam and Michael hadn't heard it, “I found someone who can help us.”

“Whaddaya m-m-mean, _someone_?” The new voice was higher, indignant, and laced with tiny hints of a startling Jersey accent.

“He's a scientist,” The Spine explained patiently, only to be cut off with a derisive huff of artificial laughter.

“Great! J-j-j-just what we need! Another _sssscientist_.”

“I don't think he's like the others. He – Rabbit, he shook my hand. And asked my _name_. And one of the others –”

“Others?”

“–mentioned something about him being attacked. Maybe he was one of the good guys.”

“He works for Aperture.”

“ _Worked_. Just let him take a look. ...Rabbit, _please_. I...” And for the first time, something like real fear tinged The Spine's voice. “...I can't fix this.”

There was a pause. Steve realized he was holding his breath.

Then – quietly, annoyed, and clearly still not completely sold on the idea – “ _Fine_.”

More footsteps. The Spine came back into view and led them the rest of the way to the wall.

Another automaton was slumped against it. Its body was not in nearly as good condition as The Spine's – on top of already looking like it hadn't been as well put together in the first place. Limbs attached to joints at odd angles, head cocked painfully and probably immovably, wires poking through gaps, especially between the fingers and toes, and the entire apparently once chiefly copper-colored form shot through with a bright green. _Oxidation_ , Steve thought, and didn't have time to wonder why because he suddenly realized the wrecked creature was _glaring_ at them with one blue eye and one green, mistrust and anger so evident he wasn't sure whether he wanted to shield Michael, who was apparently supposed to _fix this_ , or hide behind him.

“This is Rabbit,” The Spine announced, gesturing down at the other automaton and making a noise like he was clearing his throat – which Steve couldn't help but think was an odd thing for a robot to do. “My brother.”


	13. Hello?

It took approximately ten minutes for Rabbit to decide that Michael was okay.

It took about an hour for Michael to get Rabbit working.

While Michael worked, The Spine explained. “We've been taking care of ourselves,” he said, voice heavy with an old bitterness. “We're built to last. And we can fix superficial problems – limbs detaching, eyes flickering. Rust – that sort of thing. Though Rabbit insists the oxidation isn't an issue.”

“It looks cool!” Rabbit insisted, apparently unfazed by the fact that Michael was elbow deep in his chest, one hand sticking straight up through a gap at his neck to poke at something under his chin.

“ _Anyway_ ,” The Spine continued, and Steve thought with a smirk that this must be an old argument, “we were doing all right, but... There's only so much we can do about internal problems. Wiring is easy enough, but anything else... It would be like one of you trying to remove your own kidney.”

Steve shuddered.

“My systems are more advanced than Rabbit's,” The Spine went on, a trace of pride in his voice – but only a trace. “So I haven't had as many problems. But his core was starting to go bad, and I don't...” He trailed off. “I don't know how to fix that.”

It sounded like a confession. Steve started to give the word _brother_ more weight.

“To be honest,” Michael said around the screwdriver in his mouth – and seriously, what did he _not_ have in that bag? – “I don't really understand this myself, but I think I'm getting it. I did a lot of research on blue matter when I was younger.”

Steve snorted. “What, like when you were twelve?”

“Sixteen.”

“What did you do for _fun_ , Michael?”

“Built tiny robots.” He shut the door that covered Rabbit's boiler and core, patted it twice with apparent satisfaction, and stood up. “You should be good to go,” he said, wiping the oil off of his hands and onto a rag that had been inside the toolbox that he had pulled out of the bag along with a welding torch and and some vinegar and no, seriously, this guy was freaking Mary Poppins. (“We kept it in the lab because some of the equipment was pretty old, so –” “No. You're Mary Poppins. It's not up for debate.”)

Rabbit stood. He and The Spine looked at each other and didn't say anything.

Steve had a feeling it had been a long time since Rabbit had stood on his own two feet.

“How do you feel?” The Spine asked, hovering at Rabbit's shoulder. “Try walking.”

Rabbit walked in circles, and then a straight line, and then another circle, and then he jumped, and then he ran, and then he did some ridiculously complex and complexly ridiculous dance moves, and then The Spine told him not to overdo it and he sat back down.

“I f-feel _great_!” he chirped, beaming at Michael. “You're awesome!”

“Rabbit,” said The Spine, and when no one but Steve turned to look, he realized with a start that The Spine's mouth hadn't actually moved. “I think – maybe we should have him take a look at –”

“I can hear you,” Steve interrupted. “Sorry. But. I can hear you. When you do that. And I – it was starting to feel creepy.”

Rabbit and The Spine stared at him. He cleared his throat and glanced at Michael, who shrugged. “I, um. I have this thing. In my head. Well. My ears. Well... kind of. My, um. My ears are... I mean – the _insides_ of my ears... The – the... canal, and... cochlea, or whatever the hell Michael called it... Aperture replaced it with... stuff. I can hear... really well. Things other people can't hear.”

_**How about now?** _

“Yeah.”

A pause.

“Okay,” said Rabbit. “Apparently that one works.”

“Radio waves,” The Spine explained. “But not any that are audible to human ears. It's easier.”

“And secret.”

“...And secret.”

Steve shrugged. “I can still hear _something_ – like a really high buzzing. But I can't understand it.”

“Good enough.”

The buzzing went on for several more minutes. Apparently it was an intense discussion. Steve glanced uncomfortably at Michael, who glanced uncomfortably at Sam, who shrugged and said nothing.

Sam hadn't spoken a single word since Michael had started working on Rabbit.

The Spine turned to face them. “There's, um. There's...” He broke off and looked at the ground, and Steve could hear the steady _**tick**_ ing of his internalized workings start to speed up. “We...”

“We n-need you to look at somethin' for us,” Rabbit interjected, reaching up to lay a hand on The Spine's shoulder. The Spine nodded.

“Lead the way,” said Michael.

-

“His name is The Jon.”

The Spine's voice was quiet and low and he wasn't looking at anybody.

The Jon was propped up against a bit of collapsed scaffolding, slumped over in much the same way Rabbit had been.

He didn't seem to be in that bad of repair. His body was mostly brass, though bits of something that might have been gold clung on here and there. He was chiefly made up of overlapping plates, his limbs and fingers looking even more flexible than The Spine's. His face was plated as well, mouth curved upward in a faint smile. No wires protruded; no rust corroded the metal; no pieces looked out of place or cracked or even very badly scratched.

But his eyes were dark.

And he was silent.

And dangling off his shoulders, somehow the most inexplicable thing of all, was a pair of bright red suspenders – in perfect condition.

Michael knelt beside the unfortunate robot and gently moved his arms, his legs, his head – twisting, pulling, rotating – testing the joints for stiffness, Steve thought.

“We've, um. Tried to take care of him since he shut down,” The Spine said quietly. “Aperture modified him in 1992. It was part of a business deal. They altered his systems to run on a new drink called Crystal Pepsi, instead of water. The deal fell through, but nobody ever bothered to switch him back. They already had cases of the stuff in the facility, and nobody wanted to drink it – so they didn't see the point. And then, when... everything... happened – they left us here. And we ran out. Years ago. We don't...”

“We c-can't fix him,” Rabbit finished, more fury than sadness in his voice.

The Spine took Michael by the shoulder and turned him so they were facing each other. “His system is very... different,” he said, and the increased _**whir**_ s and **_click_** s told Steve he was choosing his words with care. “Our father wasn't quite in his right mind when he created him. He... went too fast, did things he shouldn't have as far as safety goes, and The Jon... Blue Matter is what holds the universe together. Colonel Walter... experimented with it, when he was building The Jon. He opened a rift.”

“A _rift_?” Steve said sharply. This sounded slightly more serious than _did things he shouldn't have_.

“A portal,” The Spine explained, “to another dimension. It left a void in The Jon's body where a boiler would have gone. The void – the portal – the things inside it... That's what ultimately powers him, but his reactor itself still needs a power source.” He was speaking directly to Michael again now, Steve and Sam entirely forgotten. “We'll understand if you can't... It honestly doesn't make any sense, and we won't hold it against you if nothing can be done, but please... Try.”

Michael nodded solemnly, pulled his goggles – also courtesy of the no-seriously-this-isn't-even-funny-anymore Body Bag of Holding (another reference Steve had made without quite understanding _why_ ) – down over his face, and got to work.

-

“This is weird.”

“You've said that _eight_ times now,” Steve said, trying to keep the boredom out of his voice for the robots' sakes. This was obviously very important.

It was also taking forever. Michael had been at it for something like five and a half hours now, cutting and welding and who knows what else as Sam, for some so-far-unexplained reason, handed him the tools he asked for. Rabbit was pacing. The Spine was sitting against the wall, head in his hands, not moving.

Steve lay on his back with his arms behind his head, letting the utter strangeness of the scene soak into him.

On top of the robots and the abandoned laboratory and the science shit in his head and everything else that he was slowly getting used to, Sam and Michael were _getting along_.

-

About ten seconds after the twelfth “This is weird,” eight hours after he had begun working on the little brass robot, Michael yelped and pitched forward straight into his chest, vanishing almost completely. Sam grabbed one ankle, Steve the other, and together they managed to pull him out.

Michael stumbled backwards and sat down hard, pulling the goggles up to his forehead. “Woah!”

The Spine got to his feet, he and Rabbit both rushing over to see.

“The void!” Rabbit cried. “It's back!”

“I can hear something,” Steve said. “I mean I _can't_... I can... hear... Silence? Emptiness. With... The hell is... Is there a _fish_ in there?”

“The koi!” Rabbit crowed, clapping his hands gleefully and bending down to peer inside his brother's chest. “The hotdog's there too!”

Steve blinked. “The _hotd_ – I give up.”

The Spine knelt down to examine The Jon's face. “He needs water,” he said brusquely. “We've got a supply of it. This way.” And he scooped The Jon up into his arms and started walking.

The water was close to where Rabbit had been. It dripped out through a pipe in the wall, which The Spine explained was actually a part of a highly advanced well system designed to expand further and further outward once the local supply had dried up. “We've mostly stayed around here,” he said, depositing The Jon carefully beneath the spout. “We have to drink every few hours, and this was the only water output pipe we knew was working.” He turned a handle on the side of the pipe and the drip turned into a steady stream. “It leaks sometimes,” he added. He pried The Jon's mouth open. “We just need to...”

“I got it.”

Michael cupped his hands under the waterfall to fill them, hurriedly tipping the contents into The Jon's mouth before it could trickle through his fingers.

Eleven mouthfuls later, The Jon's eyes opened. Steve squinted against the sudden blue light.

“Hello?” Michael tried, sounding nervous.

“Hi!” The Jon said brightly, faceplates shifting into a wider smile as he beamed at Michael. “You fixed me!”

“Uh, yeah. I... did.”

“Thanks!”

Steve glanced at Rabbit and The Spine, having somewhat expected the two of them to instantly rush forward.

They had frozen. Something dark was running down Rabbit's face from his eyes.

“Oil?” Steve questioned, raising an eyebrow.

“To make us seem more _human_ ,” The Spine muttered, snapping out of his stupor. He took a step forward, pulling Rabbit with him, and then Michael was backing away and the three robots were clinging to each other and all talking at once.

Rabbit was mostly laughing, actually. And The Spine just kept repeating “you're alive, you're alive, he's _alive_ ,” over and over again, pulling both his brothers as close as possible with his long arms.

The Jon was asking questions.

“How long was I out? Who are these guys? How did he fix me? What's going on?”

The Spine finally pulled away, shook his head, and laughed – a deep, rumbling chuckle that bordered on hysteria. “It's been... a long time, The Jon. A very long time.”


	14. We'll Get There

The Jon was quick to declare Michael his Favorite Human Ever - a title which, after Rabbit's initial objections pertaining to their creator, he changed to Favorite Currently Living Human.

Michael wasn't quite sure what to do with this information. He'd never really been anyone's favorite anything.

The Walter Bots, it was decided, would be coming with them.

Which meant water was going to be a problem.

Michael spent most of the next day getting the robots into something resembling tip-top shape, modifying their systems to run as efficiently as possible – rewiring limbs, rerouting water flow, and removing weapon functions Aperture had seen fit to install (though Rabbit insisted on keeping his flamethrower, because "Pappy b-built me with it!") and that would most likely be useless in the testing chambers. ("This isn't even a saw. This is a pizza cutter." "Pappy's was b-better.")

And then The Jon looked inside the bag, pulled out the always-upside-down device Michael had yet to discern the use of, and said, "Oh! It's just like me."

Which successfully left everyone lost for words until The Jon turned the device over, twisted it, and said, "See?"

Michael could only stare. The object had opened straight down the middle – the _seamless_ middle _;_ he'd _checked –_ , revealing a chamber the size of which wouldn't have been nearly as impressive if it hadn't been inside a tiny, vaguely egg-timer-shaped black box.

The room could easily have held at least all three of the humans, and maybe The Jon - except that the portal itself was roughly the size of Michael's fist.

Michael looked to Steve for guidance. Steve shrugged, and muttered something about having given up a long time ago, which Michael thought was a pretty dismal attitude to have.

Sam took the box, filled it with water from the pipe, and said "Problem solved."

They moved on.

-

Michael had never been a very heavy sleeper - his mind could never quite shut down far enough for that. He'd always been restless, his dreams vivid, usually extensions of whatever he had been thinking about during the day.

Until he'd woken up in a stasis chamber, wandered outside, and found skeletons scattered throughout the building he'd once worked in.

His dreams usually followed one of two major themes nowadays, and waking up with memories of faces and screaming and a needle seared into his mind was nothing new.

Waking up, opening his eyes, and seeing that it was _Sam_ who had shaken him awake, though - _that_ was pretty new.

"...What?" he managed, sitting up and pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, trying to clear the dream and the haze of sleep out of his head. "Why'd you wake me up?"

"You sounded like you were about to start screaming," Sam said.

Michael winced. "Sorry."

"Stop doing that. Come with me; I want to talk to you. Without waking up Lassie over there."

Michael blinked up at him slowly, everything still coming through kind of fuzzy. "Lassie...?"

"Because dogs have good h... Never mind. Just. Follow me."

Sam walked off without looking back, and Michael scrambled to his feet, stumbling after him. He still wasn't entirely convinced he was awake. The map in his head nudged at his thoughts and told him there was a pit about ten yards to the right, originally dug as _a holding area for new machinery, but later utilized as storage for -_

He shook his head irritably and the map folded itself back up. Metaphorically.

"Sam, there's a hole in the ground a little ways off to your right," he whispered.

"Wasn't going right," Sam called back, voice low. "And don't say 'sorry,' either," he added after a moment.

"Wasn't going to," Michael muttered, sticking his tongue out at Sam's back.

A few minutes passed in relative silence.

"Sam," Michael complained, when they had completely left behind what little light their sleeping area had offered, "I can't see anything."

"Neither can I. My eye modifications are basically just glasses. You've got a map in your head and Steve's a goddamn dolphin, so don't come crying to me about not knowing where you're going."

Michael hated arguments. He hated making people angry and he hated when people didn't like him and his usual plan of action when dealing with Sam was to be as unobtrusive and agreeable as possible.

But he was tired.

He was tired of Sam hating him and he was tired of bending over backwards to try and change it and he had just spent three days repairing and modifying a bunch of robots whose inner workings made almost no sense and he was _tired_.

He snapped.

"That's _not how it works._ " He stepped forward, seeking Sam out and grabbing his shoulder - whirling the other man to face him, even if they couldn't actually see one another. "The map isn't just _there_ \- I open it when I need it and the rest of the time I have to _concentrate_ on keeping it at bay or it intrudes on my thoughts and _takes over_ and it's all I can see. It's only dormant on its own when I'm unconscious. I kept it updated and as well-tuned as possible, but I was _asleep_ , for _years_ , and it's _old_. Steve can't sleep, he can't use portals, and when he gets overloaded with too much noise, or the wrong _sort_ of noise, he can't even _see_. He has no memory of his life before he woke up a few weeks ago. _I_ have dreams about people I trusted holding me down and drugging me and forcing me into a _coma_ , and that's not a nightmare; that's what _happened_. Stop acting like you're the only one whose life _completely sucks_ because of Aperture."

Michael swallowed, already forgetting most of the details of what he'd just said. He shut his eyes and breathed hard through his nose, in and out, heart pounding. "...Sorry."

"Aw, you ruined it. I was impressed."

He snapped his eyes open, staring at the shape that only vaguely resembled Sam. "What?"

"I knew there was a backbone in there somewhere. Sit down, tough guy. I have some questions."

Michael sat. Sam joined him on the ground a few feet way. Michael could just make out the bright orange jumpsuit as his eyes continued to adjust. "What kind of questions?"

"You fixed the robots."

"Well, yeah."

"Why?"

Michael opened and closed his mouth a few times. _Why?_ "Why... wouldn't I have? I mean, they were broken. And... sad."

Sam snorted. "Okay – you're a bleeding heart. I'll buy that. Next question: Why were you looking for survivors instead of a way out?"

Michael frowned, confused. "What, you mean _leave_ everyone down here? That would be awful. That's the whole reason we're going to this computer terminal - so we can make sure no one else is alive, and find them if they are. It's... no fun being alone down here."

Sam was silent for a moment. Michael wondered if the conversation was over. He hoped it was. He really wanted to go back to sleep.

And then, after weeks of calm resentment and quiet mistrust and passive animosity, Sam finally exploded.

He struck the floor with an open hand, the smack reverberating weirdly. "I don't _get you_ ," he hissed.

Michael's eyes were wide. He slid just a bit further away from his companion. "Wh- What? What don't you get?"

"Steve says you're a good guy. You _act_ like a good guy. You fix robots and treat them like people and you spend your time in this hellhole looking for other survivors to rescue. By all accounts, you _are_ a good guy. _Why the hell did you work for Aperture?_ "

"I -" Michael stopped, and thought, and realized that the answer he had given to this same question when it had come from his parents, his friends, his supervisors - that he was passionate about science and Aperture seemed like a real up-and-comer in the industry - was and always had been a total copout.

"Because they hired me," he said finally. "Because I love science, but my resumé was... terrible. I had a mediocre high school career and I barely graduated college, and Aperture was the only place willing to look past that and see what I could actually _do_. I... Steve usually says it for me lately, but I'm a genius, Sam. I'm not bragging when I say that. It's just what I am. Aperture recognized that, and they were willing to put me to work on projects where I could actually be _useful_. If I didn't work here, my other options were basically a garage or a self-run repairman service. Those were my backup plans. ...Well. No. Those were my _plans_. This was... a shot in the dark, and when it actually worked, I... I sort of fell in love with the company for a little bit. And you know what people say about love making you blind." He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, staring out at the darkness like he'd done so many nights before. At least this time he wasn't alone. "For a while, as far as I was concerned, Aperture could do no wrong. And then I started... reading. Test results, plans for future experiments, budget outlines. And it was... It wasn't good. Test subjects were dying and no one was doing anything about it. Safety measures were being _cut_. Nobody cared. And nobody listened to me. I got kicked off of so many projects for suggesting less hazardous methods, thrown out of so many meetings for derailing things to discuss mortality rates and safety concerns and the ethics of all the fine print in the contracts test subjects had to sign."

"Why'd they put up with you for so long?"

Michael shrugged. "Because I'm good. There were a few other people saying the same things I was, and they shot them down and got rid of them pretty quick. Fired them, as far as I knew at the time. They're..." He swallowed dryly. "...probably all dead down here, somewhere." He shook his head. "Anyway. I was stupid. I thought I was _safe,_ because I thought Aperture _needed_ me." He bit back a sharp laugh. "And for a while, they did. For a few months, I guess I was more useful than annoying. And then one day, they just..." He trailed off, pressing his face against his knees and taking a deep breath. "I don't... like talking about that. Sorry."

Sam gave a contemplative _humph._ "Well, damn. You're a regular kicked puppy, aren't you, kid? If I believe all of that - which I'm _starting_ to -, I'd have to be the worst person on the planet, barring any of the higher-ups here, to not like you at least a _little_ bit."

Michael shot his head up, not sure he'd heard right. "What - So... we're friends?"

Sam coughed. "Uh. We'll get there."

Michael grinned into the dark. "Good enough for me."


	15. She Started Talking

Steve opened his eyes and tried very hard not to think about the fact that waking up on a cold floor in the dark basement of an abandoned laboratory next to a group of slumbering robots was probably not going to be the strangest part of his day.

He rolled over, blinking up at the half-light and wishing briefly that Aperture had seen fit to enhance his night vision instead of his hearing. Then he realized that that would probably be awful, remembered that he could basically see in the dark with his ears, and decided he was going to think positively today if it killed him.

Which it might.

He got to his feet and opened his mouth to ask Michael what they were supposed to do with three powered-down robots, and then stopped and listened and realized that Michael was still asleep.

And so was Sam.

Steve frowned. That was... different. Sam was usually the first one awake, apparently preferring to sleep as little as possible so as to be on guard at all times.

"O...kay. Now what?"

_**CLUNK** _

" _Shit!_ "

Steve whirled around, heart racing, before his mind caught up with him and he remembered that _**CLUNK**_ was one of Rabbit's default sounds.

_**glrgggggg Clunk shink whzzzzzzzzclickzzzz chik chik chik** _

Steve cocked his head to the side, listening intently despite himself. He'd never heard a robot wake up before.

Other than The Jon, of course, but that had involved one too many fish to really count.

He squinted at the dark shape on the ground, trying to make it out - sonar was great and all, but he'd (probably) lived for a fairly long time with just his eyes to rely on for that sort of thing and vision was apparently habit-forming.

_**glrgrglrlgrgrl whzz click chik chik chik chik click clickclick clickclickclickclick whzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz** _

The noises settled into Rabbit's usual sounds, gears turning and water boiling, intricate clockwork punctuated with bangs and clatters and popping misfires. The low thrum of the blue matter dipped and climbed, finally establishing a steady tone just barely within even Steve's hearing range, and slowly, Rabbit began to rise.

Steam huffed out of his cheek vents and roiled upwards into nothing as he clambered laboriously to his feet, standing stock still for a few seconds.

_**beep blip click whzzz chchchchchch** _

That was new.

"What's that?"

"Just running some diagnostics," Rabbit said quietly, not sounding the least bit startled. He opened his eyes, and Steve blinked at the sudden light, blue and green separating the scene weirdly. "It's sort of what we do instead of stretchin' in the morning. Making sure I ain't gonna fall on my face or overheat or nothin'."

"That's... not why I stretch in the morning, but okay."

"Whateva. Sam and Michael are still asl-sleep?"

"Yeah. I, um. Did I... wake you? Is that even possible?"

Rabbit laughed softly. "No. We wake up after whatever time limit we set, or if someone t-turns us on manually."

"So... why are you up before your... brothers?"

Rabbit straightened up slightly. "No r-reason."

"...Right."

"Really."

"Uh huh."

Rabbit sighed, steam hissing up into the air and dissipating above his head. "I wanted to r-run the check before The Spine woke up," he admitted, and Steve had definitely never heard a robot sound _embarrassed_ before. "So he wouldn't w-worry if anything was wrong."

Steve raised an eyebrow. "What were you planning on doing if something _was_ wrong?"

"Waking Michael up. But!" Rabbit brightened considerably, clinking forward to poke Steve's shoulder with one metal finger. "Since y- _you're_ awake, I have a question!"

"Okay," said Steve, amused. "Shoot."

"What's in the bag?"

Steve snorted. "Uh. Everything, I think. Be more specific."

"What's making the n- _noise_ in the bag?"

-

Michael woke up violently and not of his own accord. Someone was shaking him.

"Wake the hell up, Michael."

Squinting against the colored lights, Michael tried to remember how his arms worked so he could shove Steve away from him. "Wh- whazzappng?"

"I am _so done_ with this. Just. Wake up and deal with this because I _can't_."

Michael shook his head and finally managed to push Steve away, sitting up and rubbing his eyes blearily. Something that had been either a dream or a real and very unexpectedly deep conversation was swimming through his thoughts. He felt the map click back on and tucked it carefully away. "Wha're you talking about?"

"Rabbit got that turret to work and now he's _talking_ to it," Steve hissed, "and it's talking back, and I am _so done_ , Michael. Just. Fix this. Please."

One day, Michael was probably going to get tired of Steve assuming he knew how to fix everything.

Today was not that day.

His face twitched into a grin as he got to his feet. "What's to fix?"

"What - is it - is it _supposed_ to talk?"

"Well, yeah. ...Your eye is kind of spasming. ...Uh. Steve?"

"No, just." Steve held up one hand, shaking his head. "Taking in the fact that an egg-shaped death machine with spider legs turning on and saying _I'm different_ is supposed to be _well, yeah_ levels of obvious _._ "

"I... sorry."

Steve growled something inaudible and led him over to where Rabbit was sitting beside their resident egg-shaped death machine.

The turret had been something of a project for him and Steve, for a little while. Steve had sworn he could hear some sort of sound coming from it - a high buzzing that usually just felt like white noise but intensified slightly whenever the bag was opened. They had sat up some nights toying with it, trying every trick Michael knew - and he knew _many_ \- to get it to open up or power on, but nothing had worked.

Sam had, quite understandably, strongly objected to the presence of a sentry turret where he could see it (and where it could potentially see them), and Michael had kept it stowed in the bag since then.

"What's goin' on, Rabbit?" Michael asked, crouching beside the two of them while Steve watched from a distance, arms folded.

Rabbit didn't even look up. "She's scared."

"Why?"

"She doesn't have any ammo and humans don't like her kind. That's why she wouldn't t-turn on before."

Michael frowned. "So she was just... dormant?"

"Somethin' like that."

"How do you know?"

Rabbit tapped the side of his head. "When my brothers and I got here, we were coded in-in to the hivemind of all the AI systems. They can talk ta us and we can talk ta them, with the r-radio waves, like we were doin' before. Course, the three of us have almost always been able to do it."

"Awesome."

"Yeah, it's pretty cool, huh? Anyway, the line's b-been pretty much nil minus the three of... well... two of us, for a long time, except some of the turrets in the old testing chambers are still active. We could sense their signal when we went by a few months ago. We heard the same thing in your bag, only you said that turret was inoperative, so I was just wonderin' what was up."

"Hm."

Michael examined the turret. It was clamped shut at the moment, looking as dead as it always had. "Is it... she... okay?"

"Steve sssscared her," Rabbit said, turning his head to glare briefly at the accused party. "He yelled."

"It started _talking!_ "

" _She_ started talking."

"Tell her we won't hurt her," Michael said hastily, trying to cut the argument off before it could really start. "Um,” he added, because he was an optimist but not a complete idiot. “As long as she doesn't try to hurt _us."_

Rabbit nodded, turning his attention back on the turret, eyes glowing slightly more intensely than usual - unless that was Michael's imagination. (But it probably wasn't, because Michael's imagination didn't do many things by degrees that could be measured as "slightly.")

After a few seconds, Michael cleared his throat. "Well?"

"She wants to be called Jenny."

Michael blinked. "Okay. Ask, uh... Ask Jenny if it's okay for me to modify her systems a little bit." His mind clicked into high gear, ideas and plans and a list of the tools he'd need flashing through his thoughts as clearly as if he'd written them down on a chalkboard. "Tell her I just want to turn down her empathy suppressor and program her to recognize us all as friends. Actually - Steve, wake Sam up so he can see me do this."

-

Jenny was sweet and demure and timid and Rabbit was falling in love with her. She perched on his shoulder when she couldn't keep up with the group and ran circles around him when they rested, spindly legs clattering on the stone floor in a way that made Steve think somehow of the constant noise of scissors in a barbershop. Rabbit would pretend to entertain some hope of actually catching her, lunging and twisting and pouncing until The Spine warned him that he was going to hurt himself - and then Jenny would panic and scuttle over to make sure he _hadn't_ hurt himself, pressing up close like she was trying to hug him.

Steve, after two days of observing this behavior, grudgingly admitted that it was, in addition to _loud_ , _annoying_ , _disruptive_ , _distracting_ , and _strange_ , also, maybe, a little bit _sweet_.

Michael thought it was adorable.

The Jon would often join in the fun, while Sam and The Spine watched from the sidelines, trading roles between worried and disapproving. ("Rabbit, your head is not supposed to turn that way." "Are you _sure_ she doesn't have any bullets?")

In all honesty, Sam had taken it better than Steve had expected. He had been fully prepared for a hushed conversation about how this was further proof that Michael was secretly trying to murder them, but nothing of the kind had happened. Watching Michael turn down whatever the hell an empathy suppressor was had apparently helped a good deal.

Sam and Michael seemed to be getting along just _great_ in general, actually.

Steve could only shake his head and assume that he'd missed something.


	16. Threat Detected

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: Physical assault, needles

"A week and a half's walk, huh?" Steve clapped Michael on the shoulder. "You sure that map is working?"

"It would have been a week and a half for the two of us," Michael said defensively (and, Steve noted with some satisfaction, did not apologize). "We lost time when we stopped and woke Sam up, and now we have... a lot of people." Michael coughed and turned red and Steve knew he had been about to say that now they had Rabbit.

It wasn't that the old bot was _slow_ , exactly - just that he was the _slowest_.

Michael cleared his throat. "Anyway. We should get there sometime in the next hour."

Jenny's excited _yAAAYy_ hit Steve's ears like metal plates scraping at each other, and he tried not to wince.

Jenny was nice. Her voice was irritating and sometimes downright painful, but that wasn't her fault, and holding it against her would only result in upsetting Rabbit - and Steve wasn't entirely sure which one of them that would be more dangerous for.

"So..." Sam piped up from a few feet behind them, walking beside The Spine. "How long has it been since this place shut down?"

Steve glanced at Michael, and they both turned to watch the conversation, continuing to walk backwards.

"Oh, a loooong time," said Rabbit, with the air of one whose great grandchildren had asked what the town looked like before several types of revolutions. "Years and years an' year an' y-years an' -"

"How many?" Sam pressed.

The Spine shrugged. "We lost count."

"What?" Michael yipped, stumbling slightly as Steve reached over and pulled him away from a hole he'd been about to step into. "Thanks."

"How did you _lose count_?" Steve demanded.

"Well, it w-wasn't easy!"

That shut everyone up for a while.

"Guys?" The Jon ventured a little later. "How long was I powered down?"

No one answered him.

A few moments later he seemed to forget the question, opting to chase Jenny up ahead of the rest of the group.

"How long was it?" Sam muttered, and Steve heard The Spine shake his head.

"Hey, guys!" The Jon called from around a corner. "Is this it?"

-

The building was small and cracked and full of stale air, and as soon as they stepped inside a voice said

_"THREAT DETECTED. YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO ENTER THESE PREMISES. THREAT DETECTED. THREAT DETECTED."_

and a panel in the wall slid open to reveal a variety of extremely advanced guns, none of which worked.

The Jon stopped hiding behind Rabbit and went to stick his tongue out at them.

Jenny scuttled after him, chirping about how rude they were.

The alarm continued to blare, klaxons sounding from somewhere outside.

_"THREAT DETECTED. THREAT DETECTED."_

"It can't hurt us!" Michael shouted. "The weapons must all be offline."

"THAT'S GREAT," said Steve, hands clamped firmly over his ears as he did his best not to curl up on the floor and pass out. "NOW TURN IT OFF."

"Right, sorry!" Michael bounded over to a panel on the opposite wall and examined it closely. "Hm. I think if I -"

The Spine grumbled something Steve couldn't make out under the noise, said "Excuse me," moved Michael politely out of the way, and stuck his hand straight through the wall.

He pulled back a clenched fist full of wires, electricity still crackling through them.

The noise stopped.

"Thank you," said Steve. "...Shouldn't that be hurting you?"

"This arm used to be part of a tesla coil projector."

"...Right."

Sam cleared his throat. "How about we get this over with before we find a part of the defense system that _does_ still work? Do your... whatever you plan on doing, Michael."

Michael was already moving to the bank of computers set into one of the walls. "It'll take a little while," he warned, turning a dial and moving several sliders upwards. "And that alarm is technically still going off - the wires in that panel only led to the bells and the default speaker. It'll probably kick back on at some point.”

"Terrific."

"Sorry, Steve."

Steve rolled his eyes.

And then an idea occurred to him. A terrible idea. An idea he really should take the time to work out properly, except that this was going to be his _one_ chance to do it, and before he could stop himself he was saying, "Hey, Michael... Can you do me a favor, and... not ask why?"

Michael threw him an odd look over his shoulder. "Yeah?"

"Is there any way to check on the status of my, um... Storage unit or whatever... the building I was asleep in, right before it collapsed?"

"...Sure, yeah." Michael moved across the room to one of the smaller computer screens, fiddling with buttons and dials that meant nothing to Steve. The screen lit up with the Aperture logo, bladed circle spinning away off to the side. Steve was somewhat disturbed to realize he remembered it. "It should start to come up in a couple minutes," Michael said, moving away to turn his attention back to his original task.

Steve stared down at the screen, already half hoping that it wouldn't work.

It did. Text flashed up - damages, fatality reports, numbers climbing dizzyingly high as he took a deep breath and searched for the information he needed.

He poked uncertainly at the part of the screen that said DAMAGES TO SUBJECTS' QUARTERS, and was slightly surprised when it responded.

He read through the entire wall of text - and then read it again, just to be sure.

The floor was falling away beneath his feet. He backed away from the screen, breathing hard and trying not to be sick.

He was not going to freak out. Not here, not now. This wasn't -

This _was_ a big deal. But nothing could be done about it, and they had more immediate things to worry about.

He glanced at the others. Sam and The Jon were hovering behind Michael, looking over his shoulder. Rabbit was sitting on the floor, Jenny skittering in circles around him and singing something high and wordless.

The Spine was watching him.

Steve's nerves jolted and he stood up straighter, meeting The Spine's gaze and shaking his head sharply before looking away.

Not. Going. To freak out. "How much longer, Michael?"

"A few minutes, probably." Michael sounded distracted. Steve looked over and saw that he was staring intently at one of the screens. "The scan's running. I've set it to overlook all of us. I..." He glanced over his shoulder at The Jon. "There isn't... really a way to scan for automated life..."

"We would have sensed any functioning AIs," said The Spine. "There's nothing but turrets. ...No offense, Jenny."

Jenny made a noise like someone blowing a raspberry, and wondering how she'd learned to do that distracted Steve nicely for a few seconds.

Something in the wall started to hum. Steve's head shot up. "Guys -"

_"-ECTED. THREAT DETECTED."_

"Wonderful," Steve muttered, clapping his hands back over his ears with a wince. He could still hear the voice perfectly clearly - high and pinched and _bored_ , as though whoever they'd got for the recording had been thinking of their grocery list at the time -, although the klaxons were at least absent this time around. So far.

_"THREAT IDENTIFIED: MICHAEL REED. ALL STAFF MEMBERS BE ADVISED, SUBJECT IS CLASSIFIED AS HAVING MOTIVATION AND MEANS. PLEASE OBSERVE THE MAIN SCREEN AS THE SUBJECT'S LAST RECORDED MOMENTS IN THIS INSTITUTE ARE DISPLAYED."_

"Oh, son of a bitch, _no_ ," said Steve, dropping his hands to his sides and looking across the room at Michael in horror.

Michael had frozen, all the color gone from his face.

"Smash the computer!" The Jon yipped.

Rabbit, Sam and Steve all moved to comply, but Michael suddenly snapped out of it, whipping around to face them, hands flying up to keep them back. "No! The scan's still running! I - It's fine. I can... It's... fine."

The large screen in the center of the computer bank fizzled to life, static running across it for several seconds before the picture resolved itself.

The display was a top view of a small, grey office, people in lab coats trailing in and out with clipboards. A small computer bank was set into one wall.

Michael was seated in front of it, typing away at a keyboard and humming something, swiveling his singularly uncomfortable-looking chair back and forth absently.

Behind him, in one of the doorways, the flow of people slowed as several of them stopped and congregated - speaking in hushed tones and glancing over at Michael now and then.

In the present, Michael said in a high, nervous voice, “Looks different from this angle.” Nobody laughed.

On the screen, the group of scientists had grown from four to eight, three women and five men. Once everyone else was out of the room, two of them quietly shut and locked the doors.

Steve kept watching, despite himself. He knew what was going to happen, but he couldn't look away. Adrenaline coursed through him, nerves jumping, muscles trembling, wanting more than anything to _do_ something about this.

One of the men crept up behind Michael and wrapped his arms around his neck, putting him in a chokehold.

Michael's reaction was instant. He spun the chair sideways, sending the man flying. "What the hell, guys?" His voice sounded fuzzy through time and old speakers. "That's not funny; I could have really hurt h-"

The man on the floor lunged forward and tackled Michael to ground, and suddenly everyone was on him.

It took several seconds for Michael to fight back. Steve tried not to wonder how long he'd gone on thinking it was a joke.

Finally, though, he kicked out, catching one of the men in the kneecap and sending him stumbling away with a litany of curses.

Michael's fist connected with a woman's jaw and she reeled backwards, swearing far more impressively.

But there were still six people on him, pinning him to the floor as he struggled and shouted. "Guys! Come on, what are you doing?! We're _friends;_ what are you _doing_?! Stop!"

Steve tore his eyes away from the screen to glance at the real Michael, and almost wished he hadn't.

Michael's gaze was trained on the scene playing out before him, fists clenched, face utterly blank. The Jon was practically hanging off of him. He didn't seem to notice.

"No! Stop it! _No!_ "

Steve's eyes flicked back to the screen, where a woman was kneeling over Michael as he writhed and shrieked. As Steve watched, insides burning up with rage, she removed a hypodermic needle from a pocket in her lab coat and calmly injected something into Michael's arm.

Michael's struggles died down almost immediately, though he was clearly still trying.

Someone opened one of the doors. Three of the scientists lifted Michael up and carried him, still kicking and screaming, however weakly, down the hallway.

Steve could still hear his cries of _no stop guys please why are you just please_ _ **stop**_ in almost perfect clarity when the footage finally cut.

For several seconds, no one said anything. No one moved. Steve tried not to breathe.

 _"THREAT DETECTED. THREAT DETECTED. THREAT DE-"_ _**kzsh**_

The Spine had found the panel that led to the backup speaker.

Steve took a moment to steel himself, and then turned to face Michael.

The Jon was still clutching one of his arms, and still going apparently unnoticed. Michael was biting his knuckle and shaking, staring at nothing, his face completely white. He looked about a second away from collapsing.

Everyone looked at everyone else, utterly lost. Even Jenny was quiet.

Steve closed his eyes briefly. He opened them, heaved a sigh, and stepped towards his friend.

"Michael?" He set a hand on his shoulder and shook him lightly.

Michael jerked away, snapping his head around as though coming out of a trance. "I - I'm -"

Steve cut him off. "You're not friggin' _fine_ and you're definitely not friggin' _sorry_. Just - just don't."

Michael nodded, clamping his mouth shut and staring at the floor.

His breath caught. He pitched forward. Steve caught him and he started to sob. "They - were - my _friends_. They _were_. I can't - I - they wouldn't..."

Steve wrapped his arms around him and let him talk. He had no real idea of what he was doing, but Michael liked hugging people, so he figured that was at least a good place to start.

Michael suddenly spasmed, jerking out of his grip and nearly falling over because The Jon was still clinging to him. "I - I - I - I can't - the map - in my head - I can't - _help_ -"

And suddenly Sam was there, prying The Jon off of him and leading him over to sit down against the wall. "Calm down," he said urgently.

"Calm _down_?" Steve snarled. "He's _hysterical_ , Sam; how is that -"

"Shut up," Sam said flatly, not even turning to look at him. "The map takes over his mind when he can't focus on keeping it at bay, and he can't focus unless he _calms down_."

Michael was hyperventilating, holding his head in his hands and twisting it back and forth violently, tears streaking his face. "I can't _see_!" he cried. "It's all just paths and buildings and n-n-numbers and I can't, I can't, I can't see anything that's real!"

“Listen to me, Michael,” Sam said calmly, firmly, hands on Michael's shoulders as he knelt in front of him. “You're all right. You just have to concentrate.”

“I c– I can't – I – ”

Steve started forward and then stopped, not sure if he would be helping or hurting at this point. He hated being this useless.

And then he heard it.

A high buzzing sound, barely perceptible. He looked around sharply at the three robots, just in time to see Rabbit nodding decisively as the noise cut out.

The bot approached Michael and Sam, gently pushing the latter out of the way and taking his place. "Michael, can ya hear me?"

"Yes," Michael whispered, his head buried in his arms. "But I can't see an-anything. And it's - it's hard to think."

"Sounds to me like a m-malfunction," Rabbit said calmly. "An' I know plenty about those."

Michael lifted his head slightly. "I - yeah?"

"First of all," Rabbit said firmly, "Sam's right. Ya gotta calm down. If you panic, it gets w-worse. Trust me."

"O...okay."

"Ya calm?"

"No."

"Deep breaths, Michael. Focus. We're all r-right here."

"Okay," Michael choked, forcing several heaving breaths before finally managing something resembling composure. "...Okay," he said, voice beginning to level out. "I – I'm calm. I think."

Rabbit laid a hand on his shoulder. "Good; you're doin' _great_! Now whaddaya usually do to get rid of the map?"

"I just - I - I sort of picture an actual map folding up and - and sliding into a dark corner somewhere."

"Okay. Try that."

"I can't - I can't visualize an- _anything_ ," Michael said, voice rising in frustration. "I can't - it's just - it's all I can s- _see_."

"Keep tryin'," Rabbit said calmly, shooing Jenny away apologetically as she came skittering over to observe. "You'll get it."

For several seconds, Michael was the only one in the room who was breathing.

"Picture the room," Rabbit said quietly. "You remember what it l-looks like?"

Michael murmured something in the affirmative.

"Good. Now picture all'a us. Good-lookin' bunch, huh?" (Jenny whistled. The Spine shushed her.) "Can ya picture us?"

"Yeah."

"Great. Now think'a that ma-map. What's it usually look like?"

"Sort of old and faded," Michael said hoarsely. "With a dotted line and a big red X on it."

Steve almost choked on a laugh, because _of course_.

Michael continued, his voice gaining strength with each word. "The edges are crinkled and burnt, and torn in a few places. It doesn't fold up right all the way and the corners stick out funny. It... It's gone." He looked around the room, blinking at everything and sounding somewhat sheepish. "It's... I can see."

Rabbit patted him on the head and stood up. He extended a hand down to Michael, but Michael shook his head. "I... not yet. S... Thanks."

The Jon knelt down beside him and threw his arms around him, and this time Michael returned the gesture, laughing tiredly. "I'm okay, buddy."

"You're bad at lying," The Jon said simply.

Michael laughed again, the sound startled but more genuine. "I... yeah. I am."

Something clicked in the computer bank behind them, and everyone turned to look. The noises escalated in size and number, gears turning, fans kicking on, everything meshing together and rising and ticking and clicking and reminding Steve that his head had been aching for the past fifteen minutes, until finally everything stopped and

_**blip** _

All the screens went dark but one.

For the longest time, no one moved.

Then Sam rolled his eyes and went over to read it. Steve heard him pull in a sharp breath, and then a much steadier one.

At last he announced, in a small, sturdy voice:

"Life reading negative. No life forms detected within the facility."


	17. Stories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING for this chapter: Suicide

They walked until the humans were exhausted, Rabbit's systems starting to freeze up, The Jon stumbling over his feet and forgetting his sentences halfway through, The Spine quietly steadying him, wincing with each step but saying nothing.

Jenny liked to sing. They let her sing them to sleep that night. The wordless cooing settled over them and floated out into the dark, the soothing sound almost enough to erase the day's events from their tired minds as one by one they drifted off.

Michael fell asleep first, sitting up against a wall next to The Jon, slipping sideways to lean on the robot's shoulder. Once he was sure the human was asleep, The Jon powered down. Sam followed suit nearby - he'd been watching Michael as well.

Jenny hopped up into Rabbit's arms, and he lay down and curled around her as best he could before shutting down. A few seconds later, the song abruptly cut as Jenny powered off for the night.

Steve couldn't sleep. He had been expecting as much. He lay on his side and stared at the darkness _(dontcloseyoureyesdon'tdon't_ _don't_ _you'll_ _seeit_ _)_ , listening to the others' breathing, listening to his own as it threatened to speed up, listening to his heart pound louder and louder and he was _still not going to freak out_.

_**Whirrrr sss whirr** _

Heavy footsteps approached him, uneven and less measured than usual. The Spine had been favoring his right leg for the past few hours.

Steve didn't move as the robot settled beside him. "You should have Michael take a look at that," he said dully.

The Spine shook his head. "It's not anything to worry about. Signals start misfiring if I don't power down after a while."

"So power down." Steve knew why he had come over here. He knew what he wanted to talk about and if he talked about it he was going to freak out and he was _not_ going to freak out he had no _right_ -

"I will. Soon," said The Spine. He paused, and then asked almost casually, "What was on that scan?"

Steve opened his mouth, intent on saying _nothing_ , but somehow the lie stuck in his throat and he couldn't say it, couldn't say anything, couldn't -

This wasn't something he was ever going to _want_ to talk about, but it _mattered_ \- it was awful and horrifying and if he didn't share it with _someone_ , at some point he _was_ going to freak out and the others would have no idea why and he probably still wouldn't tell them because it was _horrible_ , absolutely the _worst possible thing_ , and none of them _needed_ to know -

but here was The Spine. _Asking_.

Steve took a deep breath. "It's... nothing dangerous," he said carefully. "So, you know, you don't... You don't have to know it. It's... not... It's not something you want to hear."

A strange sound, gears turning differently, unfamiliar clicks, a lower _**whir**_ ring, and Steve thought that maybe The Spine had shrugged. "It didn't look like something you wanted to read," the robot said calmly, patiently.

Steve swallowed dryly, blood pounding in his ears. "I..." _justsayitjustsayitjustsayit_

He took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. "Someone else's sedation ran out before mine."

The Spine shifted slightly, but said nothing. Steve continued, keeping his eyes closed, hardly pausing for breath. "Another - another test subject. #546379," he rattled off, sure that that number was going to be blazed across his memory for the rest of his life. "My door was broken. Theirs wasn't. The building was sideways when I woke up, so I climbed up the side of it and got out. They must have tried the same thing - maybe they... they thought the collapse would have broken their door, but it didn't. They couldn't get out. They'd been awake for three months, trapped in that room, alone, and then - I..."

He stopped. Tried to breathe deeply but couldn't. Forced a shallow breath, another, and tried not to choke. "I checked a bunch of the other rooms after I got out. I guess the... the doors are meant to open from the outside; they... There were skeletons – everywhere. And then I got to this door... Kicked it open, looked inside - there was... I saw tally marks. Scratched in the floor - the wall - really low down; they did that before the building collapsed. Marking days, I guess. There were... a lot of them. And then..."

His voice faltered and then failed him entirely. He spent a few seconds just trying to breathe, to think, to not give up and start screaming.

A hand settled on his arm, cold and metallic, and he gasped in a sharp breath and suddenly he could think again, he could function. He could speak. "In the middle of the floor," he managed, voice low, rough. "The... wall. It said - Forgive me. I give up. And..." He clenched his hands into fists, and it didn't matter whether his eyes were open or closed - he could still _see_ it. "They were... hanging there. They'd - there was a lamp in the middle of the ceiling; I... used it to get out, threw the blanket over it and climbed up... They - they'd made a noose. They were... Just... hanging there."

There. He said it he said it he _said it_ now wasn't that supposed to make him feel _better?_

He swallowed harshly. "Don't - don't tell Michael." Or _anyone_ , don't tell anyone, _no one_ should – should have to - but especially Michael, especially _now_ -

He heard The Spine nod, and finally started to relax.

He'd told someone. Weeks and weeks of pretending he hadn't seen it, pretending he didn't wonder about it, opening his eyes in the middle of the night because it was _looking_ at him - hours of trying to convince himself that it was better to know, it was better not to wonder. Days and then weeks and then hours of lying to himself, locking the thoughts away, useless, unnecessary, _not that big a deal_ , and he'd _told someone_.

He was shaking - with fear or tension or relief, he didn't know. He shut his eyes again and focused on calming down - slowing his breathing, clutching at the floor because it was real and solid and _there_ and nothing he might see in his head was any of those things. The floor was real, the noises of humans breathing and dormant robots keeping themselves alive were real, The Spine's hand on his arm was real. The faceless body dangling barely a few feet up, thunking listlessly against the wall as the building shifted, _that_ wasn't real, not in the same way – not _here_ and _now_ – and the thought, ever present, _if I'd been faster –_ that was real, but it was pointless, and he was tired, and if he listened hard to The Spine's systems, the whirring and the hissing and the low hum of the blue matter, it drowned out the thoughts - drowned out _everything_ , the other robots and Sam and Michael and the facility around them and soon everything was falling away except the low _**nnn whirrrnnnnsssnnwhirrnnssss**_ and the hand on his arm, cold and grounding, as he finally fell asleep.

-

The first thing Rabbit saw when he slid his photoreceptors open was The Jon, crouched in front of him, staring intently.

"You're awake!" The Jon crowed in a delighted whisper. "No one else is. I was getting lonely."

Rabbit uncurled from around Jenny, moving everything that was supposed to move and running a brief diagnostics check. Just in case. "Well, we can't have that."

"Can we tell stories?"

Rabbit froze. The diagnostic finished, informing him smoothly that nothing new was wrong.

"Stories?"

"Like we used to do," The Jon said, nodding his head excitedly. "With horses and trains and Captain Albert Alexander and political upheavals and ice cream!"

Stories.

The three of them had been alone for a long time. The thing about being abandoned and trapped was that once you got past the soul-crushing hopelessness, you also had the soul-crushing boredom to deal with.

It hadn't been too much of a problem - they were, after all, built for entertainment. They'd used their music, at first - but gradually, the lack of audience had begun to unnerve them. They just weren't the Steam Man Band without the laughing children and fascinated adults and occasional religious protesters.

So they'd started telling stories. One would mesh into another and another and before they knew it they would be laughing at each other, arguing about plot choices and character development (which nobody but The Spine really cared about) and whether one could or could not in fact ride a quesadilla (which nobody but The Jon thought one could).

The Spine's stories had been logical and structured and very much like an actual novel. Rabbit's had been awesome, if he did say so himself, which he did.

But The Jon's had been the best. They didn't always make sense and they almost never followed any real sort of plot, but The Jon could describe things in ways his brothers couldn't imagine, drawing them in to see what he saw, and for a while it was like they were somewhere else entirely.

The day The Jon had shut down, they'd known it was coming. They'd sat together and The Jon had talked and talked and taken them to all sorts of places inside his imagination and when he couldn't talk anymore they'd taken his hands in theirs and tried to return the favor, telling him stories and memories and how much they loved him and _we'll think of something, The Jon, we'll get you back, just close your eyes and when you open them it'll be like nothing happened, just go to sleep -_

The stories had stopped after that.

Rabbit blinked, shaking the details of the memory away. "The Jon, d'you..." He trailed off.

"What?"

"D'you remember...? When y-you..."

"Oh! Yes," The Jon said brightly. "You guys told me bedtime stories."

"Bedtime...?"

"You said to go to sleep and you'd find a way to wake me up. And you did."

And it hit Rabbit that for The Jon, that was all that had happened. He had gone to sleep and woken up. The few days of tossing ideas back and forth with false enthusiasm before finally admitting there was nothing they could do, the horrid despair that had morphed into horrid resignation over the years, the fear that gripped them both when either of them malfunctioned because neither of them wanted to be left alone and neither of them wanted to leave the other - The Jon had experienced none of that, couldn't possibly understand it, and Rabbit hoped he'd never have to try.

Rabbit looked at his brother - his baby brother, standing there innocent and happy and just wanting to tell stories, just wanting to have fun. The Suspenders hung off of his shoulders, attached to nothing, because after the third scientist who had tried to remove them was dragged off into a purple fog, Aperture had finally relented to The Jon's pleading to leave the garment alone for their own safety.

Because The Jon was inherently kind and inherently good, even to the people who were horrible to him, and look where it had gotten him.

Because he was _too_ kind, and _too_ good, and Rabbit was supposed to protect him, and look where he had gotten him.

Rabbit reached out and pulled his brother into a tight hug.

"Rabbit?" The Jon squeaked, startled. "What's the matter?"

"Nothin'. ...Nothin'." Rabbit let go, drawing back and smiling at him. "Yeah, The Jon," he said softly. "We can tell stories."


	18. What

Somewhere around Rex Marksley's third trip around the sun on the back of a flying whale, Michael woke with a start, jumping to his feet and looking around wildly.

"Hey," Rabbit said loudly, calmly. "You f-for sure awake there, champ?"

Michael stared at him, blinking owlishly. He shook himself, apparently snapping out of something. "I... yeah. Sorry. What's going on?"

"We're telling stories," The Jon said matter-of-factly. "About space and dinosaurs and cowboys."

"...Cool."

Michael came over to sit beside them, leaning against The Jon and yawning. "Can I listen?"

"Sure!" The Jon said happily, shifting slightly so the clearly still out-of-it human wouldn't fall off of him.

It was at this point that Jenny woke up.

Her shell opened with a hiss, legs shooting out to meet the floor as she stood up and skittered over to Michael, nudging his side and babbling nonsensically.

Michael put a hand on top of her to keep her at bay, looking confused. "Wha - what does she want?"

Something was pummeling the radio receptors in Rabbit's AI, and he quickly tuned in.

_bag bag bag bag bag bag bag bag_

He tuned back out, dimming his sensitivity to Jenny's particular frequency.

He loved her, but _boy_ did she know how to talk.

"She wants to see the bag," he said, puzzled. "I'm not sure why."

"...Okay." Michael stood and crossed the floor, Jenny following close behind. He opened the bag and she nearly pushed him over backwards as she jumped inside, rummaging through everything and tossing out each object she rejected.

"Hey, hey hey!" Michael protested, diving to catch the pocket dimension full of water. "Jenny, what are you doing?"

Jenny turned the bag over sideways and crawled out, nudging the life scanner ahead of her.

Michael stared. "...What do you want with that?"

Jenny ignored him. She was poking and prodding at the scanner, scuttling around it in tight, frantic circles, chattering something indecipherable.

"Do you want me to turn it o-"

The scanner flared to life.

And said, in a voice like a defective turret, "GREETERINGS. I AM QWERTY. IS PLEASURE TO MEET YOU."

"...What."

Michael looked over at Rabbit and The Jon and repeated himself weakly. " _What_?"

Rabbit shook his head, photoreceptors as wide as they could go. The Jon shrugged.

Michael wished he was Steve, so he could believe blindly that his scientist friend would know what to do about this.

-

QWERTY refused to function properly unless asked nicely, and by name. And even then, its results were questionable. They had run a few checks, and Steve was fairly certain that there was no form of math in which two plus two equaled a suffusion of yellow.

Not that they had much need of a scanner at this point, anyway.

As far as Michael could tell, Jenny had sensed a dormant AI function in the little touchpad, and now that it had been activated, it was fully enjoying its sentience.

No one else was. Except, perhaps, Jenny.

But forcing the ecstatic scanner to shut down felt a bit too much like murder for anyone to seriously suggest it - even Sam, who grumbled about calculators with too much personality and outright refused to carry it; and Steve, whose head had started aching hours ago and was probably not going to stop any time soon.

QWERTY and Rabbit were arguing. QWERTY had declared itself Jenny's best friend, a claim which Rabbit had contested hotly - until Jenny had chirped that QWERTY could be her best friend and Rabbit could be her husband, which effectively shut Rabbit up for a while.

Ten minutes later, a quietly defiant "I WILL BE JENNY'S WIFE" had sent Rabbit into an uproar and the three of them right back at it.

Six hours later, QWERTY had covered every topic from how great it was to be able to talk, to the fact that if Jenny was a she  _she_ wanted to be a she, to why she got a biological life reading from The Jon. She was currently exploring every single variation of every word beginning with M, and if Steve had to listen to one more second of an argument about whether "mango-ing" was, in fact, a word, his head was going to explode and he was not going to regret it.

He was in the middle of opening his mouth to tell The Spine that no one cared if an insane Game Boy thought fruits could be turned into verbs only to realize he didn't actually know what a Game Boy was nor why he should be comparing QWERTY to one when Michael spoke up.

"Um. We're here."

Steve looked around. He didn't see anything. "What?"

"This... This is it."

"Um. Michael..."

"No, I know," Michael said hastily. "I'm not seeing things. Knock on that wall."

Steve did.

It was hollow. He could only conclude that he hadn't noticed it before because he had been doing his best to will himself completely deaf. "Well, that's... That's, uh. How do we get in, Michael?"

"Hold on." Michael had shut his eyes, and appeared to be concentrating on something. "There's a scanner... six feet... this way. Everyone but Sam and Steve, stay put." So saying, he took each of them by the arm and walked them forward, eyes still closed. "You're the only ones registered as test subjects. It'll reject anyone else. We'll have to sneak in behind you."

"Well that sounds perfectly safe," muttered Sam, trying to bat Michael's hand away from his shoulder.

Michael said nothing. He positioned them both and opened his eyes, backing away quickly.

_**hhhHMMMMMMmMMMMmmMMMM** _

Steve tensed, trying to hold still as the scanner went to work, glancing at Sam out of the corner of his eye and envying his bored expression.

The scan stopped. Something in the wall clicked. Gears began turning over each other, noises like a giant clock, and the wall slid into itself.

"Go ahead," Michael said, sounding perfectly at ease. "We'll be right behind you."


	19. Problems

The tunnel leading to the test chamber was the cleanest part of the facility Steve had seen. Michael mentioned off-handedly that these particular chambers had hardly ever been used, but when Sam asked why that was, he clammed up and changed the subject.

Steve resigned himself to another horrifying revelation at some point in the near future and moved on.

The passage was grey and muffled, the tiled walls and stone floor swallowing up their footsteps in a way that was vaguely disturbing. The echoes rose and then died, choked off before they could spread. Lights flickered on as they passed, buzzing low and loud.

The round, sleek door at the end slid open with several _**clank**_ s of heavy machinery that contrasted just sharply enough with the robots to make Steve's head swim.

The chamber itself was small, square, and almost blindingly white. A grey cube sat in the middle of the floor, just slightly askew, directly underneath a glass tube jutting down from the ceiling.

There was another door set into the opposite wall, humming slightly. A large red button rose up out of the floor beside it, so obvious and inviting that Steve asked immediately, "Is it a trap?"

"No," said Michael.

"Yes," said Sam. "To trick you into letting your guard down."

As he spoke, The Spine picked up the cube and effortlessly carried it to the other end of the room, setting it down on top of the button. It depressed with a hiss and a satisfying _**chunk**_ , and the door opened.

Steve raised an eyebrow. "So... I'm guessing they're not all this easy?"

The Spine paused in straightening up and glanced at his brothers, who giggled uneasily. Michael cleared his throat. "Uh -"

"No," said Sam darkly, and walked through the door.

Steve followed, shuddering as he passed through the light blue haze in the air. He felt something crackle up and down his back, prodding at his nerves. "What's this stuff?"

"Emancipation grill," said Michael, stepping forward to examine it. "It vaporizes Aperture equipment so test subjects don't try to walk out with anything. ...Ah -"

He turned to the robots, rubbing the back of his neck and asking awkwardly, "You guys aren't... registered as _equipment_ , are you?"

They looked at each other. "We're not _supposed_ ta be," said Rabbit. "Technically. Legally."

"Not that that means much here," said The Spine.

"Well, there's only one way to find out," said The Jon, and stuck his hand through.

Michael and Rabbit both yelped and leapt forward, Jenny screeched, and The Spine, who was closer, reached out to yank his brother away - but he was too slow.

The Jon's hand passed through the film completely unharmed. "It works, guys!" he said happily, drawing his hand back and smiling around at everyone. "...What?"

"Don't _do_ that!" Rabbit snapped, stomping over to shake him by the shoulders. "We already lost y-you once! Give a g-guy without a heart a heart attack, jeesh."

"Sorry," The Jon said sheepishly, patting Rabbit on the arm and twisting around to look up at his other brother. "Sorry, The Spine."

"Just don't do it again," The Spine muttered, and crossed over. The Jon followed.

"What about Jenny?" Rabbit asked, crouching down so the turret could clamber up onto his shoulder. "How do we g-get her through?"

"Actually," Michael said brightly, "I already took care of that! When I modified her systems before, I made enough alterations that she shouldn't be recognized as Aperture-built equipment anymore."

" _Shouldn't_?"

"Won't," Michael clarified. "Definitely won't."

"You're s-sure?"

"Yep."

"How sure?"

Jenny huffed a dramatic, electronic sigh and leapt off of Rabbit's shoulder, scuttling safely through the doorway and giving a little cheer when she reached the other side.

"...Very sure."

Rabbit crossed through, patting the top of Jenny's head fondly. "Always the girl of action, huh, J-Jenny?"

"Hey!" The Jon yipped indignantly. "You yelled at _me_ for going through!"

The two of them fell to squabbling, and Steve rolled his eyes and stepped away, trying to tune them out. "What about QWERTY?" he asked Michael. "And the rest of the stuff in your bag?"

"Same thing," said Michael. "All of it's been modified too much to register as Aperture stuff."

"...Why?"

"I got bored. A lot." Michael shrugged, shouldering the bag and walking through the door. "And I used to... sort of hope I'd end up going through here at some point, whether I found anybody else or... figured out some way to do it on my own."

"I don't know how much depressing backstory I have it in me to listen to right now," Sam said flatly, but he clapped Michael on the shoulder as he spoke. "How about we keep moving?"

-

The lift was going to be a problem. It had clearly been designed with a maximum of three passengers in mind, maybe four if the last was child-sized, a possibility Steve didn't like to think about.

"We could take turns?" The Jon suggested, but Michael shook his head.

"It's triggered by success in the test chamber... I'm not sure it would work twice."

"Great," muttered Steve, at the same time that The Spine said, "Fantastic." They looked at each other, frowned, and looked away.

It took about twenty minutes of pushing and shoving and yelping and apologizing to get it right.

The robots, obviously, had to be on the bottom. Jenny huddled between them, closing up completely and resting against Rabbit's leg, taking up as little space as possible.

The humans looked at each other, sighed, and picked a robot.

Michael clambered up on top of The Jon, pulling the bag up after him and awkwardly trying to hold it out of everyone's way. QWERTY's indignant babbling about being kept in the dark could be heard through the burlap.

Sam stood on Rabbit's shoulders, looking more annoyed than worried.

Steve and The Spine glanced at each other and shrugged. Steve rolled his eyes and climbed aboard, opting to sit on the robot's shoulders, not particularly caring that he probably looked like an overgrown child trying for a horseback ride. He would take balance over dignity any day.

"...Now what?" asked The Jon.

"There's a button behind you, Rabbit," said Sam.

"Right," said Rabbit. "...Uh. I'm afraid to m-move."

There was a pause.

"Do it anyway," Sam advised.

Rabbit pressed the button and the lift jerked into sudden upward motion.

Steve tried (but not very hard) not to smirk as Sam and Michael both flailed for balance, Sam eventually grabbing hold of Rabbit's head and Michael crouching low on The Jon's shoulders, shoving the bag against the glass wall and leaning on it.

The entire ride lasted maybe two minutes as the lift accelerated, reaching speeds Steve was not ever, ever going to contemplate. Ever. The sound - the air between the glass of their containment pod and the glass and metal of the narrow passage that encased it, the sudden complete absence of the noises of the previous test chamber and the presence of new ones - already told him more about it than he wanted to know.

They lurched to a stop and the glass slid into itself to form an exit.

The group fell out in an ungainly heap, limbs everywhere, the Walter bots throwing their human charges before they hit the ground so as not to crush them. Jenny opened up with a delighted yip, running circles around the groaning mess and singing at the top of her voicebox.

Sam stuck his leg out and tripped her. Rabbit admonished him, but not very convincingly.

Steve got somewhat unsteadily to his feet, heaving a sigh and reaching a hand down for whoever wanted to take it.

"Well, that's gonna be fun to do _every time_."

-

The next two chambers were also beguilingly simple, though the third did involve a laser cutting through the room for no apparent reason other than to unnerve them.

The noise was starting to get to Steve.

The first chamber hadn't been bad - had been a lot quieter than the rest of the facility, in fact.

But the second had contained some moving platforms that hummed and buzzed and moaned on top of the standard clinking and clanking and various other sounds that everyone else could hear - and the apparently bottomless chasm that stretched _beneath_ the platforms reached into Steve's head and laid a blanket of bewildering silence over everything, similar to the void in The Jon's chest but somehow infinitely more terrifying.

And now the laser.

The low buzzing wasn't too bad by itself, but it multiplied and split and hit Steve's ears like a scattered radio signal, and when Michael apologetically explained that Thermal Discouragement Beams were dispersed throughout Aperture by means of tiny portals all Steve could do was laugh. Hard. For a full minute.

The chamber after that, though, was the worst. ( _So far_ , Steve reminded himself, and promptly told himself to shut the hell up because that was _not helping_.)

It looked simple enough. Put one portal in the wall on their level, one in the wall on the raised platform where the door and the button were located, carry a cube through, and get out.

The instant Sam fired the second portal, Steve knew this was going to be a problem. Every sound in the room cycled through endlessly, swirling in on each other and themselves until nothing made sense.

Michael asked him a question that Steve guessed was something along the lines of "Are you okay?"

He grinned, gave a thumbs-up, shut his eyes, and ran through.

For one blissful second, he was deaf.

And then everything came back online and it was all loud squashed compressed stretched hot too hot how could sounds have a temperature he didn't know but it was scorching searing too hot to breathe everything looping and running into itself and hey, hello, why was he on the floor and who was shaking him?

"-ey. Hey! Steve!"

Steve blinked up at Sam and shook his head, trying not to laugh because the fact that he wanted to was scaring him slightly. "'m okay," he said, latching on to Sam's arm to pull himself up.

He could see Michael and the others a few feet away, looking worried, voices meshing and congealing like soup.

_t's happening?_

_e okay?_

_sn't this bad before, environment must be havinganeffectonStevecanyouhearus?_

He blinked. Concentrated. The sounds began to separate.

"Steve?" Michael was suddenly crouching in front of him, too close, just like last time. "Can you hear us?"

"I'm fffine. Fine. Voice is... weird. Sorry." He shook his head again, harder, shutting his eyes until everything stopped melting. "Wow. Okay. Yeah, I'm actually fine now. I think."

"...Right."

He realized then that he was still mostly on the ground, white-knuckle grip on Sam's arm, one knee under him as his other leg just kind of existed and did nothing helpful.

Sam hauled him to his feet, one hand clutching the back of his jumpsuit tightly. "Come on, Flipper. I think we're done for the day."


	20. Break

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS for this chapter: Self mutilation, war.

Steve could handle the portals - if they were simple, and if he was careful, and went slow, covering his ears the entire time and just trying to shut everything out.

But necessity dictated that the portal work become more complicated. Once the Aerial Faith Plates got thrown into the mix, he was pretty much done pretending not to hate absolutely everything.

The robots, apparently, had all had their legs modified to work like Long Fall Boots - years before Long Fall Boots had been invented.

"Pappy did it," The Jon said proudly. "Before World War I. Fixed up our insides and casing so we wouldn't fall apart, too. In case we had to jump out of anything or got thrown or -"

"Or blown sky high," The Spine cut him off bitterly.

"...Or that," The Jon agreed, smile drooping a bit.

And, honestly, at first, Steve _tried_ to find it fun - soaring through the air, knowing he would land on his feet. Watching the ground stretch out beneath him, empty chasms falling away.

Listening to the air rush past. His own body's reaction to the adrenaline rush, pulse and heartbeat quickening, blood pounding. The silence of those same chasms reaching up, clawing at him, daring him to panic and throw off his trajectory so it could drag him down and drown him. The pressure in his head shifting with the altitude, the synthetics of his inner ear apparently unable to simply pop in quick adjustment, instead keeping up their usual slow adaptation - half muffling everything like he was underwater, slow screaming in his ears, steady searing pain with jolts of whitehotsharptooloudwrongpitch that stabbed at him until he saw spots.

The first time he landed, he fell to his knees, gasped for breath, pushed himself up - gritted his teeth, and said nothing.

The fifth time, he stumbled over to the nearest wall, leaned against it - tried taking deep breaths, gave that up as a lost cause, and vomited.

He pushed off from the wall, staggering backwards, somewhat concerned by the lights bursting in front of his eyes and the ringing getting louder and louder and maybe he should sit down -

Someone picked him up. _Lifted_ him, effortlessly. Must have been a robot. Too bad he couldn't see or hear anything to tell which one.

He tried to protest - he was fine, he wasn't an infant, he could _walk_.

Except he clearly couldn't. Couldn't even speak, opened his mouth and forgot how words worked, where the air was supposed to come from, dim memories of a voice that came with an overenthusiastic shoulder clap, _"Project, Negrete! Get their attention!"_

Was that... What -

He tried to keep his eyes open but everything was a swirling mass of dark sounds, high colors, sparks exploding, burning, spinning -

Some small part of his brain made an executive decision on behalf of the rest of him. He passed out.

-

Michael finally cracked under Sam and The Jon's constant badgering and admitted why these chambers had seen such little use.

"They were, uh. A kind of final test," he said, rubbing the back of his neck and not looking at anybody. "For subjects who'd reached the end of their contract. They incorporated elements from every other test chamber, to see how well they'd learned everything. That's why the lift at the end goes all the way up. It's a reward for anyone who manages to get through."

"So... Why wasn't it used very often?" Steve asked, morbidly curious. He wasn't sure where the morbidity was coming from, but he figured he'd find out soon.

He was right.

"Not very many subjects... made it that far," Michael said, shrugging uncomfortably. He glanced at Sam. "And... the ones who did - Aperture found loopholes, ways to... keep them. Time in stasis didn't technically count as time served under a contract, so they used to... Keep people under and experiment on them. Stuff like yours ears -" he nodded at Steve " - or your eyes." and at Sam.

"So I was either really, really good," Steve mused, "or really, really unlucky."

"Basically."

"What about you, Sam?"

Sam said nothing - his face was white, jaw clenched. He shook his head.

"...Anyway," said Michael, in a hopelessly transparent attempt to change the subject. "I guess we're pretty lucky these chambers are even self-automated. Last I knew, Aperture was working on an AI that was meant to run the testing programs."

The effect on the rest of the party was immediate. Sam missed a step and sucked in a short, sharp breath; QWERTY's steady stream of babbling, which they had all by now (even Steve) learned to tune out, kicked up into a register of utter panic; The Jon nearly tripped over Jenny, who had uttered a quiet _eep!_ and closed in on herself; Rabbit gave a high, nervous laugh -

\- and The Spine simply stopped moving.

Steve got the distinct feeling he'd missed something.

Michael looked around at the stalled cluster of automatons and Sams, utterly bewildered. "Wha - what? What did I say?"

But the robots had already clearly made the decision to pretend nothing had happened - The Jon cradled QWERTY in the crook of one arm, trying to soothe her into quieting down; Rabbit knelt and carefully coaxed Jenny back out of her shell; The Spine shook his head and kept walking.

Sam joined him, taking another deeper, calmer breath and saying, voice undisguisably dark and heavy, "Maybe some other time."

Steve looked at Michael. Michael looked back, eyes wide, mouth open. "I - Steve, _what_ did I say?"

Steve could only shrug. "I have no idea. Amnesia, remember?"

-

The farther they went, the more complicated the tests became - the chambers slowly dwindling from pristineness to disrepair to wreckage as more and more complex machinery continued to operate with no upkeep.

And absolutely everything made noise.

Steve was losing his mind.

Five days with no sleep. He could function, but just barely. The life support kept him upright, moving, breathing, but that was about it. The sudden stabs of memory were becoming more frequent and less vague - college - theatre - hell week, running on coffee and not much else. Fire.

Why was there always fire?

That fifth night, sitting up with his arms around his knees, glaring at the burning overhead lights and wishing for darkness - he couldn't take it anymore.

He woke Michael.

"Turn it off."

Michael blinked at him, sitting up and making an apparent effort to at least sound awake. "What?"

Steve dragged him away from the others so as not to wake Sam. "Turn it off," he repeated. "Or down, or something. I don't care how. Just. Please."

"...Steve, I can't just -"

"Yes you can. You fixed Rabbit and The Jon and you don't even _understand_ them - you at least know how humans _work_."

Michael sighed, running a hand over his face. "This," he muttered. " _This_ is the day I no longer like that you think I can fix everything."

"You can _try,_ " Steve said sharply, aware that his voice was pitching higher, aware, suddenly, that he was teetering on the edge of hysteria. He just wanted to _sleep_. He took a deep breath. "Please.”

"Steve, listen -"

"I've been doing nothing _but_ listen," Steve snapped. "Michael, I can hear _punctuation_ when people talk. I don't remember what sleep is. _Please."_

For a long moment, Michael just looked at him.

Then he said, very quietly, "Sit down."

Steve sat. Michael joined him. "About a month after I woke up," Michael said, still low, quiet, falsely calm, "I tried to take the map out of my head."

Steve blinked. "You - what?"

"It was driving me crazy. What - what you guys saw... happen... When it took over... That wasn't the first time. It was just the first time it didn't end in me passing out."

Steve's breath caught in his throat. "Michael -"

"Wake up from a nightmare, map comes back online while I'm still panicking -" Michael sliced the air with one hand. " - done. Before the scanner was working, search a building, all skeletons, start to freak out - done. Get upset _at all_ , no one to help me, can't calm down - _done._ The map goes offline when I'm unconscious or asleep, so that at least fixed it."

One day, Steve thought. One day, Michael would run out of awful things to reveal.

"Eventually, I thought - you know, it's not like I can screw up and kill myself..." Michael huffed a laugh, bitter and cold. "So I... found the tools I'd need. Went into an office, found paper and a pencil. Drew out where all the test subjects were so I could keep looking if it worked."

"Michael, you don't have to -"

"The life support dims pain," Michael said, voice far away. "But it doesn't _block_ it. And blood loss is blood loss. I woke up on the floor. Found an old chemical shower and got the blood out of my hair and clothes." He shrugged. "Moved on."

Steve's skin was crawling.

Michael turned to look at him. "It's your _head_ , Steve."

"Okay," Steve said faintly, but Michael wasn't done.

"Your _head_. Your _brain_."

"Okay, I get it."

"I'd be able to get further with you. You'd pass out, but I wouldn't, and then what? It's not _just_ synthetics in there. I'm not a brain surgeon, Steve."

"Okay."

"You'd go deaf; that would be unavoidable."

"Okay -"

"The life support can't do anything about _instant_ death." Michael's voice was rising, wobbling. "And it'd be so easy to mess up, cut the wrong thing, contaminate something -"

" _Okay_ ," Steve said gently, setting a hand on Michael's shoulder and shaking him. "Okay. Michael - okay. I get it. I won't ask again."

"...Good."

They sat together against the wall, not speaking, not moving, until the others began to wake.

Steve swiped a rag from Michael's toolbox, folded it up into a thin strip, and tied it around his head to cover his ears.

It mostly just made everything sound like he was listening through a wall. He told himself it helped.

-

Steve had worked out a system.

Many of the chambers were set up in a way that didn't even necessitate portals, if you were resourceful and patient and happened to know Parkour. He took his time, examined the rooms from all angles, found close-set walls, old pipes and bits of debris that had broken through, cubes that let him reach just that little bit higher if he turned them onto a corner and managed to balance long enough to jump.

But this wasn't always an option, no matter what he tried or how hard he looked.

And then he would keep going, pressing on through portal after portal and never complaining, even when it got to the point where he basically had to be hanging off of somebody else. He stepped onto Aerial Faith Plates, shut his eyes, landed on his feet, made no effort to stay on them, and lay as still as possible until he was sure he wasn't going to throw up or pass out. And then he got up and kept moving -

\- and kept moving, and kept moving, forcing himself forward, pushing his limits until he _did_ pass out, and then he didn't even have to worry about not getting any sleep.

It wasn't perfect. He was still holding the group back, he was sure of it - but not as much. He usually made it to the end of the last chamber before his consciousness utterly fled, and even if he didn't, it was no trouble for The Spine to pick him up and carry him.

It wasn't perfect, but it _worked_ , and if the others didn't stop trying to tell him that it was fine to take breaks and that they weren't in any rush and that they'd rather spend an extra week or two down here than watch him slowly collapse in on himself, he was going to punch someone in the face. This was a problem, because he wasn't sure who it would be, and he didn't want a broken hand on top of everything else, no matter how quickly it would have healed.

Rabbit was the worst. And also the best. Because Rabbit _understood -_ and still argued with him _._ Rabbit powered on early some 'mornings' to talk to him, about feelings of obligation and guilt and dragging others down and how it was important to push those feelings aside and keep yourself in good repair for your own sake sometimes. Rabbit asked him how he was doing. Rabbit kept asking until he answered.

Rabbit's auditory system was not as advanced as his brothers'.

He didn't like the portals, either.

He wasn't as bad off as Steve. It didn't _hurt_. But it was annoying, and certain systems shut themselves off to compensate and he would spend half an hour hearing only on one side, or unable to process spoken language.

They fell through the exit door one (probably) night, robots stalling and jittering, Jenny and QWERTY wailing, Michael's shirt singed from a close call with a discouragement beam. ("It's a laser. _Call it a laser_. Give me _something that makes sense_ , I am _begging_ you - just _call_ a _laser_ a _laser_.")

No one spoke. Rabbit calmed down Jenny, Jenny calmed down QWERTY, and everybody looked at everybody else and wordlessly decided that yes, they were very, very _done_ for the day.

Steve lay down and curled into himself, perfectly aware that he wasn't going to fall asleep. He pulled the rag down over his eyes to block the light. His head was pounding and everything _hurt_ and he was tired enough to scream if it wouldn't have killed him.

But he was _fine_ , he was going to lie here for a few hours and at least let his body rest if not his mind, and he was going to get up when the others did and they would all pretend to think he had slept and he would keep moving and ignore the fact that his life had turned into a migraine during a hangover during an earthquake and he was _absolutely fine_ -

_**clank clank glrgrglrlglrgrl clank shunk** _

Rabbit settled next to him, laying a hand on his side. Steve flinched away from the blue and green lights of his eyes, visible even through the layers of the rag, and they subsequently dimmed.

"You'll be okay, kid," Rabbit said quietly, and - and had he called him that before? Had he called _any_ of them that before? How much effort should he be putting into objecting to this?

"You rem-mind me of some'a the soldiers," the robot continued, shifting slightly. The hand on Steve's side slid an inch, and the jumpsuit slid with it against his skin, and he could _hear_ it, and it _hurt_. "Hurt pretty bad. Could'a gone home, or at least taken a week off. A night. They w-wouldn' do it. Fought the d-doctas to let'em go back out. Said they were okay. 'Cept they weren't, a'course. They were hurtin' and slow and not thinkin' right, and they went out there and g-got hurt even worse. I carted some of'em to the field hospital m-myself. Some of'em didn't need it - didn't make it that long."

Rabbit was - relatively - quiet for a moment, apparently lost in thought.

He heaved a sigh, one of many habits the robots seemed to have that had startled Steve at first but that now seemed perfectly natural. "You'll be okay," he repeated softly. "But y'gotta give yourself a break, sometimes. You're hurting," he said pointedly, "and you're slow, and you're not thinkin' right. And none of us wanna watch you die."

Steve said nothing. He lay there and shook and tried to breathe and felt something cold burn outward from his eyes, seeping into the makeshift blindfold.

Rabbit, he decided.

Broken bones be damned, _Rabbit_ was the one he would punch in the face.


	21. Playing Therapist

Jenny was useful.

There were other turrets in the chambers. Most of them were dead, but a few were still active - and still armed. And Jenny was the only one in the group they wouldn't fire at.

She, however, held no such qualms about her brethren.

It didn't bother her, not even a little bit. They were mindless, volatile drones who wanted to hurt her friends. She wasn't like them.

She was different.

The screaming was a _little_ odd, sounding, as it did, exactly like her. But that was all. She didn't look at the fallen and sees corpses - just deactivated weapons. Deactivated a touch violently, perhaps, but she didn't exactly have many options.

The humans were starting to like her more. Even _Sam_ had patted her on the head - well, the top of her body in general - after she had taken out a room crawling with -

 _not_ her brethren. No. She was different.

Anyway. The humans liked her. The Jon always had, and The Spine remained indifferent. She wondered about him sometimes.

And then there was Rabbit.

She loved Rabbit. Love was strange and exciting and fun and _completely_ foreign and new. She hadn't been designed for it. The scientist - Michael - whatever he had done to her had changed that, changed her capacity for thinking and feeling and it was the most wonderful thing in the world.

She didn't really understand what her friends wanted. They talked of _escape_ , of _getting out_ , but out to where? Escape from what? _She_ was gone. There was nothing to worry about anymore.

They did worry, though. About that. About _Her_. The ones who knew about her, anyway. Steve and Michael didn't seem to understand.

Sam, though. Sam understood. He understood what She was, what She had done, what She had _meant_.

Jenny didn't require nearly as much time in stasis as the others. She was usually up and waiting for them when they started to wake.

One morning (the humans called it morning, at least), while she waited, Sam started to move.

It wasn't human-waking-from-sleep-mode moving. It was - limbs twitching, shoulders jerking, breathing speeding up and getting shallower like he was running. It was the kind of movements Michael made in his sleep sometimes, right before he yelled.

Concerned, Jenny scuttled over to the human and prodded carefully at his side with one leg.

He woke instantly, sitting bolt upright, hands flying to the portal gun he always kept at his side, hefting it more like a potential club than anything else.

Jenny darted back away from him, squeaking in alarm, and for a moment they stared at one another, frozen.

Sam set the gun down. Sighed. Pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers.

Jenny approached him once again, slowly this time. He smiled, which confused her, because nightmares weren't usually the sort of things humans smiled about.

"Sorry about that."

She made a dismissive sound and settled next to him, pushing up under his arm until he let it fall around her.

"You trying to play therapist?" he asked, in that voice humans used when they might have been laughing but weren't.

Jenny gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. (She often found that _noise_ actually worked better than _words_ when communicating with her friends.)

Sam did laugh, then - in the sort of sad, harsh way that Jenny could never understand. Laughter was supposed to be happy.

He pulled his knees up and slouched forward against them, curling his arm tighter around her. "Well. You asked for it."

Jenny nudged closer into his side, indicating to the best of her ability that she was listening.

Sam took a moment to get started. Several times he opened his mouth only to close it again, as though the words just wouldn't come out right. Jenny could understand that. Language was strange.

Finally, he seemed to settle on something. "I was a good test subject," he said quietly. "Too good. I had this bad habit of doing better than they expected me to - keeping all my limbs, not dying. That sort of thing."

He fell silent for a moment. Then he spoke again - still quietly, far quieter than necessary. It was hours before anyone else would normally be waking up - including Steve, who had blacked out completely once he'd stopped moving. He seemed to be taking things easier since Rabbit had spoken to him a few nights ago (and Jenny felt another new thing at that, something that she thought might have been _pride_ ), but it was still... difficult for him.

"It wasn't that bad for me," said Sam. "When She... took over. Bad in a _different_ way, at least. At first. At first I thought it was _better_. At least she was only doing... behavioral tests, logic puzzles, that kind of thing. She didn't seem interested in... biological experimentation. Two years after I... joined," he said, and tapped the side of his head. "Woke up with _new eyes_. After that I couldn't... I never let my guard down. Not that I had before. But. After She showed up, at least I didn't have to worry about waking up and finding - I don't know, a fake nose, or... tentacles for arms or anything. It was always the same thing. Portals. Mazes. Just get through it and ignore everything she said. Always... the same thing." He trailed off, his hold on Jenny loosening slightly.

"I still... don't..." His voice was rougher, and wandering, and she realized that every time she had ever heard him speak he had known beforehand exactly what he was going to say. Maybe he didn't now. "I know this is... real. But I _don't_. I - I..." He glanced at Steve and Michael, at Rabbit and his brothers and QWERTY. "...I trust them. But. It's... hard. Because I'm not supposed to. I'm not supposed to... give in to that. To... believe I can get out."

He swallowed. She was aware, suddenly, that she was emitting a high pitched whining sound and cut it off before she could hurt anyone's ears.

"I trust _them_. I don't... know if I trust _me_. To not be making it all up."

After that, he seemed to be done talking.

For a long while, he didn't move. He sat with his arm around her, breathing slow and calm and even but in the same way that The Spine's voice was calm and even whenever he told The Jon to stop asking questions and then Rabbit would look worried about both of them.

Jenny translated this to mean that she should still be worried about Sam.

She twisted in his grip, pushing gently at his side until he lay back down.

He laughed again, the sound softer than before. "Thanks."

She burrowed back under his arm and hummed contentedly - and kept humming, quietly, until her friend fell back to sleep.


	22. Speed

Things were looking up.

Steve was, frankly, suspicious. Nothing had gone catastrophically wrong in the last three test chambers. He was sleeping better. (Not _well,_ but _better._ ) The Aerial Faith Plates seemed to be getting more and more downplayed, cropping up every two or three test chambers as opposed to two or three times every chamber. And everyone was getting along.

He was struck with the uncomfortable realization that he was less worried when there were things to be actively worried about.

The introduction of _Gel_ in the next chamber abated this anxiety a bit, at first. The blue stuff - “Repulsion Gel; it’s basically a substitute for the Faith Plates except less focused - er, sorry, Steve,” Michael rattled off - was certainly worth worrying over.

Except it really wasn’t any worse than the Faith Plates, and sometimes wasn’t even as bad. It didn’t require any sort of further adjustment on his part other than maybe glancing down at the floor every once in a while to make sure he wasn’t about to accidentally step on a patch of the stuff.

The orange stuff was…

interesting.

“Propulsion Gel,” Michael said. “Watch your step; if there’s even a hint of a slope it’ll - THE JON NO.”

The Jon had set his foot down on the very edge of the orange slick with an air of scientific curiosity. Ignoring Michael’s warning, he leaned forward, shifting his weight onto that foot.

Immediately, his leg slid out from under him and he pitched backward, torso hitting the Gel and slipping down the apparent incline of the floor -

\- which continued into another room and out of sight.

The chain reaction was almost instant. The Spine and Rabbit dived after their brother, whether intending to follow him or try to pull him back Steve couldn’t be sure. Michael was a split second behind them, shouting over his shoulder, “WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T SWALLOW ANY!” Jenny squeaked and jumped after Rabbit, legs scrabbling uselessly as she tried to catch up and instead tipped over sideways, screeching indignantly as she slid.

Steve and Sam glanced at each other. Sam shrugged. “It probably leads to where we’re supposed to go anyway.”

“You say that like we wouldn’t follow them if it didn’t.”

“Well, maybe not exactly like _this_. Shall we?”

“You first.”

Sam rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue. “I’ve dealt with this stuff a few times,” he said, stepping forward and adjusting the portal gun on his arm. “I’d recommend going on your knees if you don’t want to kiss the ground ten seconds into it.”

“Noted.”

Steve gave Sam a slight headstart before deciding that this was probably going to be terrible no matter what he did so he might as well have a modicum of fun with it.

He stood directly in front of the edge of the Gel and shut his eyes, searching for a center of balance the way he’d learned to do before going into any of the more complicated Parkour moves.

He stepped forward.

And very nearly faceplanted. He corrected himself at the last second and managed to keep his feet.

He’d expected it to be like ice skating - not that he really knew what ice skating was like, outside of the vague ideas that everyone who’d never ice skated probably had. At least he _assumed_ he’d never ice skated.

At any rate, it was _not like ice skating_ , unless he was vastly wrong about that activity. It was more like flying - only less terrible, because there were no shifts in altitude to adjust to. The friction between his feet and the floor was so close to nonexistent he couldn’t tell the difference, and he honestly wasn’t sure how he was balancing. But he was. So he decided not to question it. Questioning, he’d learned, tended to lead to horrible things.

Somehow, he seemed to be catching up to the others. Sam was only a few feet ahead of him, on his knees and seemingly in relative control of his momentum.

The rest of the group was having no such luck.

Michael managed to latch on to The Jon’s arm, only to be frantically shoved away - no doubt to prevent him being crushed by the several tons of metal hurtling towards the two of them in the form of The Jon’s brothers. Michael slid a few feet in the opposite direction - far enough to reach Jenny and hook an arm around her, halting her slow but perilous progress towards the edge of the slick. He was still holding onto his bag with one hand. Steve could hear QWERTY’s confused _**whir**_ s and _**beep**_ s through the burlap.

The Walter bots seemed to be doing their best not to crash into each other. Rabbit had curled as far into a ball as he could manage, making himself as small as possible. The Spine was taking the opposite tactic, arms oustretched and pushing his brothers as far away from the rest of his body as he could.

Steve caught up to Sam and tried to slow down and stay level with him. “They kind of look like a bunch of drunk penguins,” he said conversationally.

Sam snorted. “They kind of usually do.”

The robots reached the end first, hitting normal ground with a shower of somewhat worrying sparks and grinding to a halt.

Michael was next, letting go of Jenny and the bag to cover his head with his arms as he hit the floor and rolled several times. The bag spun away from him and slid to a halt - the top, thankfully, was tied shut. Jenny righted herself and leapt into the air, hitting the ground again and hopping a few times to keep her balance before skittering over to the bag, presumably to check on QWERTY.

Sam slid neatly to a halt at the edge of the strip, having leaned backward a few yards ahead of time to slow himself down.

Steve jumped just before the Gel ran out, feet coming down hard on the grating in the floor that the stuff had apparently fallen through. He stumbled forward a bit but kept his balance.

He looked around. Nobody else was on their feet. The Walter bots were a tangled heap of metal trying to extricate themselves from each other. (“Can we do that again?!” “Shhhhut up, The J-Jon.” “Guys, this isn’t helping…”)

Steve offered Sam a hand up. Sam ignored it, getting to his feet and brushing himself off.

“Ugh. I think some of that stuff got in the gun.”

“Better than in your mouth... I think there’s another rag in the -"

A sudden high wailing kicked up. Steve flinched, and turned to see that The Jon had gotten to his feet and was pointing unhappily at something.

“-AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH MICHAEL’S BLEEDING!”

Sam and Steve bolted as one.

Michael was lying flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling with a dazed look that cleared slowly as he started to laugh. “I’m fine, you guys, just - the floor…”

Steve saw immediately what had happened. Grated floor plus high speed plus tank top made for torn up arms. The bleeding wasn’t that bad - he suspected the life support had a lot to do with that.

The Jon had fully escaped the heap of Walter bots now, and made his way over. He’d stopped wailing, much to Steve’s relief, but still didn’t look exactly pleased with the situation.

“Michael?”

“I’m fine, The Jon. Already healing.”

“…Any reason you’re still on the floor?” Sam asked, casually.

Michael shrugged. “…I think I hit my head. Kind of hurts. Dizzy, just… a little… That’ll heal too. Pretty fast.”

“You sound concussed,” Steve said flatly. “How fast does that heal?”

“Half hour, maybe.”

“…Why do you know that without thinking about it?”

“Long story.”

“So you’re gonna be okay?” The Jon asked anxiously.

“Yeahp,” Michael confirmed, and rolled over onto his stomach, burying his face in his arms - to get away from the light, Steve guessed. “Juuust gimmeabit…”

The Jon nodded. Then he looked at Steve and Sam. “Do either of you know anything about robuts?”

Steve frowned. “Not that I remember.”

“Not much. Why?”

The Jon bit his lip. It was a strange thing for a robot to do, but they had all grown accustomed to these robots doing strange things for robots to do - and to this robot in particular doing strange things in general. “Spine’s hurt.”

Michael pushed himself back up. “What?!”

“He’s - he’s okay, but his leg won’t move, and… and he’s hurt and you’re hurt and…” The Jon wrapped his arms around himself and looked miserable. “…I didn’t mean to.”

“‘sokay,” Michael insisted, scooting closer and managing to reach high enough to pat the bot’s knee. “We had to get over here anyway. Next time we’ll take it slower, okay?”

“Kay.”

“Is The Spine in pain?”

The Jon shook his head. “Nuh-uh. He says…”

“Okay, good.” Michael lay back down. “Pretty sure I’mma throw up if I walk. I’ll take a look at him soon as I’m better.”

“Thanks.”

“Mm-hm.”

The Jon wandered back over to his brothers. Michael curled up tighter and shut his eyes.

Steve looked from Michael to Sam and back again. “Should we let him sleep with a concussion?”

“A magically healing concussion? I don’t see why not.”

“‘s not _magic_ ,” Michael growled. “‘n yeah’sfine.”

“Welp.” Sam unlocked his portal gun and set it down. “The door’s right over there - this chamber must just be Gel practice. I say we rest here for a while, maybe the night. Then Michael can fix up The Spine and we can get going.”

“snndsgoodtome”

“…Go to sleep, Michael.”

“kay”

Sam looked at Steve, raising an eyebrow. “Good with you?”

“I get a vote?”

“Not really.”

“Then yep, that sounds great.”

“Good answer.”

-

Jenny and the bots went into stasis. Michael slept. Sam and Steve observed.

Sam had long since finished cleaning the Gel out of his portal gun and lain the weapon aside. Steve made a mental note of this being the first time he'd seen Sam spend any significant length of time more than three feet away from the thing and figured that was probably some sort of progress he was allowed to be pleased with.

“You can sleep, you know,” Steve pointed out, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms. “You don’t have to keep me company.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Why’d you -“

“Tell me Michael wouldn’t walk straight into a bottomless pit in this state."

“…Point.”

They observed some more.

Sam nodded over at the robots. “Kind of cute,” he said, sounding amused. “How they do stuff like that.”

Steve looked.

The Spine generally preferred to go into stasis sitting against a wall, but apparently he hadn’t been able to move far enough to get to one.

Instead, his brothers had elected to become a wall for him. They had clustered together at his back, Rabbit standing up as usual, The Jon curled around Rabbit’s legs - almost as a support. The Spine was leaning against them, his right leg splayed out at a horrific angle, disconnected at the hip and knee. Rabbit had an arm around his neck, draping back over his shoulder on the other side.

Steve fought down a smile. “Yeah, I guess.”

They were quiet for another few minutes. Steve’s attention was mostly fixated on Michael. Seemingly magical life support or no, it had apparently been very well stamped into him at some point that you weren’t supposed to let people with head injuries fall asleep.

Sam heaved a sigh and joined him in his arms-crossed leaning. “We’re kind of thinking along the same lines, right? That things are going too well?”

“Yup.”

“Good. I’m not crazy, then.” He paused. “Or at least not crazy alone.” He paused again. “For that reason.”

Steve glanced sideways, studying Sam briefly. Even leaning back against the wall and clearly lying about being tired, he somehow managed to give the impression that he was ready to leap into action on less than half a moment’s notice. “…You’ve been here a long time, you said. How long?”

Sam shook his head, laughing lightly. “Nah.”

“What?”

“We’re not doing that - the whole… sharing and caring thing, right now. You don’t want to. Trust me.”

Steve shrugged, less bothered than he probably should have been. “Suit yourself. …But yeah. Today was almost… fun.”

Sam laughed harder, covering his mouth when Steve winced. He continued to snicker into his hands, sounding somewhere halfway along the line progressing from exhausted to hysterical. “You - you realize - how messed up that is?”

Steve snorted. “ _Oh_ yeah. Stories for the grandkids, man.” He put on his best go at a wobbly, elderly voice. “‘We all fell down a water slide of probably poisonous orange goo, and there were only two _sort of horrific_ injuries. Now _that_ was a great day, sonny jim!’”

He caught Sam’s eye and they both doubled over laughing, trying to muffle the sounds into their sleeves and hands so as not to wake Michael. Eventually Steve’s head throbbed so badly he had to sit down, but he didn’t mind overmuch.

Sam sat beside him, wiping tears from his eyes and grinning. “You all right?”

“Yeah, fine. Well.” Steve shrugged. “No. But, y’know.”

“Yeah.”

They watched the others in silence for a bit. Michael turned over and muttered something unintelligible.

“Well,” Steve said, and tried not to start laughing again. Maybe he was more tired than he’d thought. “Michael’s fine.”

“Yup.”

“…Something terrible’s gonna happen soon.”

“Probably. If it makes you feel any better, next time the Gel shows up there will probably be a ramp.”

“That sounds potentially awful. Thanks. You’re a good friend, Sam.” Steve pulled the rag down over his eyes. “I’m going to attempt sleep.”

-

The day started out well enough.

Michael took about an hour and a half to fully reconnect The Spine’s leg and make various other minor repairs to all three of the bots.

He took another five minutes to fix the metal strap of his wristwatch. The clock itself hadn’t stopped, a fact he seemed disproportionately relieved about.

“Why do you even bother with that thing?” Sam asked, watching him work.

Michael shrugged, ducking lower over the watch and speaking quietly. “I built it myself. They left it on me when they put me under, and it was still running when I woke up. I figure… Maybe it’s still accurate.”

Sam blinked. He looked at Steve. Steve blinked, shook his head, and said “…Woah.”

“It might be…” Michael turned the watch over, briefly. “…eleven twenty-three in the morning above ground right now.”

“Woah,” Sam echoed.

“People might be eating breakfast,” Steve said, trying to process the thought. “Or lunch.”

“The well-t’-do folk’ll be havin’ brunch,” Rabbit supplied.

Jenny blipped inquisitively. “Breakfast-an’-lunch,” Rabbit explained. She blipped again. “…Food.” _**blip**_ “Uh. Fuel for humans.” _**blip**_  “Humans who ain’t b-breathin’ Michael’s magical science stuff.” _**blip**_

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Steve, who wasn’t, at all. “But my head’s about to explode. _Please stop_.”

There was a pause.

“Shhhe said _sorry_ over the radio waves,” Rabbit said sheepishly.

Steve rolled his eyes. “It’s fine. Let’s just get moving.”

They got moving.

The next chamber had no signs of Gel, orange or blue. It was also falling apart. Walls had crumbled, Pneumatic Diversity Vents and Thermal Discouragement Beams jutting out at odd angles.

Every time they hit a chamber full of advanced machinery that had torn itself to pieces due to lack of maintenance, Steve had to bite his to tongue to keep from voicing the sudden thought that the Walter bots had done pretty okay on their own - because when he actually thought about it, well, they _hadn't_ , really, had they?

The noise in the room was nothing short of horrifying. The repetitive _**whir**_ ing and _**shnk**_ ing of some machine caught in a loop throbbed at the air like a bruise. Rabbit whacked the side of his skull and muttered, "There gah-goes the right ear." Steve felt lightheaded and impossibly heavy all at once.

And then - a new noise. Sort of. Familiar, but overlaid with just enough of something different that he couldn't quite place it.

A slow-building hum, steadily louder and thicker - and surrounding it, the whine of straining metal, the shatter of splintering plastic -

Steve's eyes widened and he turned around just in time to see the base of a Discouragement Beam burst through the wall as the constant _**whirrrrr-shnk-whirrrrr-shnk**_ broke into a steady _**whrrrrrrrrMMMMMMMMMM**_ and then choked off completely.

The Discouragement Beam continued to hum as it charged.

Steve turned back around to warn the others, only to find that they had all seen it and leapt out of the laser's most likely path - all except Rabbit, who clearly hadn't heard a thing.

The laser fired - a single, short beam - and died.

"Rabbit!" several voices rose in a panicked chorus.

Time slowed down.

Rabbit turned, saw the bolt, and started to move - too slowly.

Jenny was faster.

The little turret charged straight into the beam's path - clearly knowing exactly what she was doing.

It struck her dead-center and exploded in a brief burst of flame - Jenny, shrieking, along with it.

Time sped back up. Ashes floated down.

Everyone ran to someone else.

Steve and Sam ran to the remains of the turret, as though hoping to find her crawling out of the pile of soot.

The Spine ran to Rabbit, turning him away from the scene.

The Jon ran to Michael and asked if he could fix it.

"I..." Michael swallowed. "I'm sorry. I can't... fix _ashes_ , The Jon. She's... Jenny's gone."

Rabbit's knees buckled and he hit the ground, more gracefully than he would have if The Spine hadn't been holding his arms. He hunched over and began to emit an impossibly high whine.

From somewhere in the depths of the burlap sack, QWERTY jabbered incessantly, voice rising and glitching in distress.

Steve's vision started to blotch with colors he was pretty sure didn't exist outside of the human mind. He stepped away from the tiny, smoldering hill of ashes and soot and sat down. Sam laid a hand on his shoulder. Steve looked up and they grimaced at each other.

"Kind of hate myself," Steve muttered.

"Join the club."

"Hating ourselves or hating me?"

"I'd hit the back of your head if I wasn't pretty sure it would knock you out cold at this point."

"Yeah, please don't. Thanks."

The Jon retrieved QWERTY from the bag and spoke to her in a low voice until she quieted down. Then he hugged her against his chest with one arm and made his way over to Rabbit and The Spine. Michael drifted slowly to the human side of the room, sitting down beside Steve and staring blankly at the floor.

"Don't even start blaming yourself," Steve growled. "You just said it - you can't fix ashes. No one can."

"I know," Michael said softly.

"Good."

The three of them watched from behind as The Jon handed QWERTY over to Rabbit, who clutched the tablet close. Oil had begun to pool on the floor.

The Jon slung an arm over his oldest brother and quietly, gently, began to sing.


	23. Everyone Started Talking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER: Suicide (mentioned)
> 
> NOTE: It's been brought to my attention that some people are confused about what's going on with Sam's legs, and I realize I haven't exactly described the knee replacements. Here's a still shot of what they look like, from one of the Portal games: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100620162326/half-life/en/images/f/fc/Advanced_Knee_Replacement_zoom.jpg

They built a fire, because they felt like having one. There was plenty of flammable debris littering the corridor, and dragging it all into a pile was an easy excuse not to speak.

_**cLACKcrackttttllllchKT** _

Steve turned to see Rabbit's jaw unhinging, his entire lower face reshaping grotesquely as the tip of the flamethrower emerged from his throat. He set QWERTY down and gently detached The Jon from his waist before stepping closer to the heap of metal and plastic and -

He didn't _breathe_ the fire. It wasn't an exhale. There was nothing remotely natural about it. The attachment sputtered and choked, entirely separate from the functions and sounds of Rabbit's body. Steve suddenly understood why he hadn't used the weapon in the chambers before now.

The device calmed itself eventually, quieting, and then Rabbit went as close to stock-still as Steve had ever seen him out of stasis, and a shower of sparks rained down on the pile of debris - and then, finally, a tiny lick of flame that managed to catch something, and the whole mound flared up as Rabbit stumbled back.

The Spine caught him by the shoulders and held him steady as the flamethrower retracted. After a moment, he pushed his jaw back up into place by hand, looking annoyed.

_**Haven't done that in a while. Now I r-remembuh why.** _

Steve was used to hearing snippets of conversation not meant for him. The robots often forgot - or just didn't care - that he could hear their default radio frequency. (One of these days, he would ask Rabbit why he still had the stutter when he wasn't speaking aloud. ...Maybe.) He shook his head and sat down between Sam and Michael on one side of the fire. Rabbit settled between his brothers on the other side. The Jon linked elbows with him, holding QWERTY tight against his chest with his other arm.

The fire wasn't going to last long. The plastic was burning and twisting and smoking and the metal was glowing red. The flames were running out of material. Steve stared into the flickering red-orange and let sudden voices wash over him -

_I will put_ _**fishing line** _ _around the dipping area if you idiots don't stop trying to dance through it_

_**Below** _ _the wick, Thomas!_

_Just ignore him, Negrete; he's only here to impress Hill and she's about to murder him - if he doesn't light himself up first..._

_Wind's kicking up, watch yourselves!_

_NOT_ _**THAT** _ _RAG -_

He blinked.

That last one had been _him._ There was no question about it.

It was... strange, being _certain_ that he had said something and having no recollection of saying it. Amnesia as a whole was getting a bit old - he was used to it. It was the specifics that still shook him.

The voices slipped away and less concrete memories took their place - vaguely familiar emotions, associations lighting up patterns in his brain he couldn't read, old _feelings_ he couldn't place. All of it disjointed and leaving him feeling, somehow, seasick.

He shut his eyes. When he opened them, the fire was nearly out. He watched the last twist of flame burn down to nothing, smoke curling up towards the ceiling. The warmth remained, emanating weakly from the metal as the humans moved closer to it and each other - Steve hadn't realized how _cold_ he was until heat had come into play. Like the first bite of food that leaves you suddenly starving.

And _how_ would he know _that_? He didn't remember eating. Ever. Strange thought.

The quiet left in the wake of the fire's hissing and popping was soon filled by the sounds of human and automatonic life – hearts beating, blood rushing, slow breathing, gears turning, water bubbling - all overlaying a rolling silence, cut through by the swishing of a discontent tail fin.

"We were undercover."

Steve snapped his head up, saw and heard Sam and Michael do the same, as everyone - The Jon and The Spine included - stared at Rabbit.

"The f-family sold us to Aperture," Rabbit said stiffly, staring at a fixed point on the ground. "So we could spy."

"Rabbit," The Spine said softly. "Maybe this isn't - "

"They should know. All of it. Ev-everything."

"They _should_ ," The Spine agreed. "But maybe not tonight."

"I ain't l-l-l-likely to be in the m-mood to talk about it again anyt-time soon, The Spine," Rabbit snapped. "It's n-now or never."

The Jon ducked away from both of them, bringing his hands up as though to cover his face and stalling partway through. QWERTY slid screen-down into his lap and _**blip**_ ped unhappily as he rattled. "Please don't fight," he whimpered. "Please don't fight please don't fight please -"

The other bots' attentions shifted instantly to their brother. "We're not fighting, The Jon," The Spine said calmly. "We're discussing."

"Your discussions used to get loud."

"Well don'worry 'bout tha-that, The Jon, because we ain't dis-dis-dis- _discussin',_ neither." Rabbit's gaze burned into The Spine, a plain challenge. He waited a beat - curled an arm around The Jon.

Upping the ante, Steve thought. Clever. Also, horrible.

The Spine bowed his head. "Fine."

Rabbit nodded. He started to let go of The Jon and then seemed to change his mind, pulling him closer instead. "So. As I was sayin'. They s-sold us to Aperture, but not r- _really_ , I mean - it was... We v-volunteered. It was Peter's... It was Peter Walter V's id-d-dea but we... we agreed, went along with it. He didn' - no one f-forced us inta anything."

"Aperture was interested in Walter Robotics," The Spine cut in. "They had been, for a long time. Michael mentioned that they had been working on... acquiring us... back when he worked here."

Steve heard Michael's teeth actually click together as he bit back an apology.

The Spine continued. "That would have been - what, the seventies? Eighties?"

"Eighties," Michael said hoarsely. "Yeah."

"The deal went through in 1990. There were rules in place, naturally. Contracts. To protect us. And them. They weren't to attempt to reverse engineer any of our cores. They didn't. They were afraid to."

"Becile," Michael said quietly.

The Spine nodded. "Yes."

"Um." Sam raised his hand. "What?"

"1950," Rabbit said darkly. "The Beciles and the Walters - old family rivalry, long story. Two of the Beciles st-st-stole my core and tr-tried to reverse engineer it. It exploded. Killed two people. Among other things."

Sam inhaled sharply. "I... I remember reading about that."

"History cl-class?"

"Newspaper," he said quietly. "I was young. I never remembered the specifics. Just that it had to do with robots being stolen and something exploding."

"Yeah, that's, uh. Usually us," The Spine muttered. "Anyway. Even Aperture knew better than to risk recreating that sort of incident, especially since none of us understood it well enough to explain to them how it happened."

"They did ask you, though?" Michael cut in, voice sharp. "They would have broken the contract. If you'd been able to tell them."

"Yes."

Michael bit his lip, but said nothing else.

The Spine continued. "The biggest stipulation in the contract other than that was that we were to be treated as employees. As _people_. Which we were." He paused, looked away from everyone else for the first time since beginning to speak, and said quietly - bitterly - "On paper."

"Not that people have it all that great here," Sam muttered.

The Spine inclined his head in Sam's direction, conceding the point.

"Things went downhill reaaaal fast," said Rabbit, bringing up his other arm to pull a surprised-looking The Spine closer on his other side. "They sep-sep-separated us, for a while. That was in the contr-tract too, they weren't supposed ta do that. Didn' last long anyway. Fffffffigured they could keep a bettah eye on usss if we were t-t-t-togethah. Took our clothes, said they got in the w-w-w-w-w-way too much. Left Tha Jon's sssssuspenders on account'a the demon what tries to steal the soul of any human who touches'em."

Steve blinked. Opened and closed his mouth a few times. "... _What_."

"Long story," Rabbit said, waving him off. "Anyway -"

"No, wait, seriously, WHAT? _Demons_? There are _demons_ now?"

" _A_ demon," Michael corrected him. "It sells the Suspenders to people and then collects their souls as payment, but it hasn't figured out how to reap electronic souls yet. The Jon's had them for a long time. So the demon gets kinda trigger-happy now if a human touches them."

Steve gaped at him. " _...Why do you know that?!_ "

"He fixes us!" The Jon piped up, sounding affronted. "You think I'm gonna let him touch them by accident and get _snatched_?"

"That's - okay yeah that makes sense but seriously _demons what_ \- " He turned to Sam as a last hope, throwing one arm up helplessly and trying to ask a question that came out as more of a pained bleat as he felt the last of his sanity slip away. Again. It was a daily thing, really.

Sam shrugged. "I gave up on things making more sense than the minimum amount required for the universe to keep running a _long_ while back, Steve."

"I... djjh... what... ...Fine." Steve dropped his head into his hands. " _Fine_. Demons. Fine. _Why would there not be demons._ "

"Um." Michael set a hand on his shoulder. "You okay?"

"Yep. Perfect. Just. Yeah." He kept his head down but raised one hand in a gesture towards the robots, turning it to motion for them to go on. "Keep - keep telling the story."

"I'm pretty sure I still have some of our stuff," The Jon said thoughtfully. "When they took our clothes - I kept our hats and The Spine's tie and Rabbit's goggles and threw them in the void. I bet I could find them again."

"The Jon," Rabbit groaned. "You been s-s-sayin' that for yyy _yyyears_. You're not gonna _find_ 'em. It's a _void_ , not a _pocket_."

"You never know," The Jon huffed.

"Anyway," The Spine said firmly. "Rabbit's right -"

"Been knnnnown t'happen on occasion."

"Things... Things went bad. Our contract was for two years. Three months after we should have been sent home was when they modified The Jon to run on Crystal Pepsi. We'd known something was wrong for months before that - the experiments we were being assigned to were all set to run until long after what should have been our final day. So we figured... They would lose interest in us, eventually, and then if they didn't actually let us go we'd be able to get ourselves out. I'm - sure the family was working on it, but Aperture had a... frankly terrifying legal team."

"Yeah." Michael snorted derisively. "They kinda had to."

"In the meantime," The Spine continued, "We just had to... stick it out. Deal with things. And then..."

He trailed off into an uncertain silence, looking away once again.

"GLaDOS."

It was always interesting, watching robots wince.

Steve looked over at Sam. "What?"

"GLaDOS," he repeated, staring hard at the bots. "Right?"

Rabbit nodded.

"The... Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System?" Michael sounded confused. "What about it?"

"So you knew about that."

"Not a lot. Just that it was a project. Everyone knew about it. It was a running joke back from way before I started working there - kept getting scrapped and then rebooted. Why? What happened?"

"They finished her," The Spine said quietly. "She came online and... took over."

"Wh - what... How did - what do you mean? What did she do?"

"A lot. Killed most of the scientists in the area. And there were... children there that day."

" _Why_?" Michael demanded, sounding aghast.

"Bring Your Daughter to Work Day."

"... _Why_?"

"They didn't have that when you were here?"

" _Why_ would - _who would bring children here_?"

"A lot of people, apparently."

"So - the kids..."

"Yes. Them too."

"Oh... Oh, God." Michael looked like he was going to be sick. Steve felt numb.

"Not - all of them. Some scientists, some children - they survived the neurotoxin. The scientists managed to get close enough to GLaDOS to attach a morality core. A conscience. She stopped killing and started... experimenting. Running tests. Essentially doing everything the scientists had already _been_ doing, but without the shred of decency they'd still had. She took the survivors - scientists and children - turned them into test subjects."

Michael rested his head in his hands and stared at the floor, shaking his head back and forth and muttering a constant loop of "Oh God, oh my God, oh God no..."

"One girl..." The Jon said meekly, sounding not at all pleased to speak. Didn't want to make his brothers do it all themselves, Steve guessed. "One of the children. Chell. She grew up. She escaped. She beat GLaDOS and got out... Twice. The first time, they dragged her back in. GLaDOS fixed herself up and took over again."

"She w-woulda died," Rabbit said quietly. "Chell. When they br-brought her back, they put her in stasis, but the cr-cryo was all offline. But there was a man - one'a the scientists, GLaDOS nnnnneva caught him. R-real jumpy fella, name of Doug Rattman. Never trusted anyone or anything. 'swhat ssssaved'im. He was the only one r- _ready_ for a hostile computer takeover. We ran into'im a couple'a times. Never r-r-really trusted us neither, but we tr-tried to help him out when he'd let us. He couldn't get the cryo back onl-line, so he p-p-patched her room into the emergenc-ency stasis network. But he got... hurt. T...turrets. He had t-t-o get passsst a bunch of'em to get to the contr-trols and they g-got'im pretty bad. He got Chell all set an' then... He didn' - he didn't make it."

"Chell woke up again," said The Jon, a note of determined cheerfulness in his voice. "And she got out. For good this time. There was a robot - they're called cores but they're robots - his name was Wheatley. He helped her get out. Things... went wrong, and Wheatley - he switched places with GLaDOS and it - it did somethin' to him, and - and anyway Chell won and Wheatley and another core ended up on the moon but the other core always wanted to go there, so that's okay. And GLaDOS - somethin' was different about her after that. She was less, um... evil. But she was broken. She thought she fixed herself but she didn't last too long after that. A couple decades later she went offline, and... things got real quiet."

"Everything shut down," said The Spine. "Most of the life support systems were self-sufficient enough to keep running for a while, but a few of them were knocked offline right away. There was nothing... We couldn't do anything. We didn't even know where to start. We didn't know - anything. How to work the system controls or even where most of them were. I think Aperture suspected the Walters' real motives when they handed us over. They never let us near anything important. We had no idea how anything worked. And at that point we'd found the water. Rabbit and I couldn't get very far from it, and we didn't want to send The Jon on his own for too long. There wasn't much he would have been able to do without help, anyway."

Sam leaned forward, frowning. "So..."

"So we - waited. For someone to find the facility, for our minds and bodies to fall apart. Whatever happened first. For GLaDOS to come back online, for a while."

Sam sat bolt upright. " _What_ \- The Jon said -"

"That never happened," The Spine said smoothly. "It _won't_ happen. We knew it wouldn't, it just... took us a while."

A beat of (relative) silence. Two. Three.

Rabbit let go of his brothers to throw both hands up in the air. "An' that's the m-meaning of Christmas, kids! Story's over."

Steve clapped a hand over his mouth because it was _not okay to laugh right now_.

And then - everyone started talking.

Michael talked about the other scientists, how he'd been _sure_ they were friends, how he wanted desperately to believe that they'd been forced to do what they did because he couldn't accept that the people he worked with every day, talked with every day, the people who asked how he was doing and told him what was going on in _their_ lives - that they would turn on a friend so easily, without remorse. That people could be that terrible.

Rabbit talked about standing by helplessly as Aperture methodically destroyed his brothers and himself, about watching The Jon slowly shut down, about not knowing if he hoped he or The Spine would be next because he didn't want his brother to die sooner but he didn't want him to be alone.

The Jon talked about sitting in the dark, knowing hundreds of people were dying, all around them, every minute, and being unable to stop it. About how it reminded him of the wars they'd fought in, tried to help in. About sitting down one day and not being able to get back up and knowing that was it and trying not to be scared because his brothers looked so sad already and he didn't want to make it worse.

Steve talked about the memories that nipped at his mind whenever they pleased and then fled, about the constant presence of fire underneath it all, about the _screaming_ that he still couldn't make sense of.

And then, though he didn't plan on it, he found himself talking about Test Subject #546379 - it was surprisingly easy, surrounded by everyone _else_ coming out with horrifying revelations. He talked about how short a time span it must have been between them hanging themselves and him finding them. How he should have moved faster. How they should have been _switched_ , how the other person should have been in the perfect room, not _him_ , how he bet whatever modifications may have been done to _them_ hadn't left them paralyzed by _loud noises_ of all things, how they would have been able to actually _contribute_ to the group. How he was useless and a dead weight and he'd just been _lucky_ and he hadn't _deserved_ it and _why hadn't he just moved faster_ -

The Spine didn't talk about anything.

Neither did Sam, at first.

And then, when things had begun to wind down, and Steve was contemplating looking for more scrap to restart the fire if Rabbit was up to it, he heard - quiet, low, spoken at the ground -

"I was supposed to be here for six months."

No one else said a word. Nobody had interrupted anybody as they spoke - nobody had moved, nobody had cut in with a _but_ or a _why,_ and that was the only reason any of them had been able to say as much as they had. So nobody prompted Sam to continue. They just waited.

He didn't look up. "I signed on during my last year of high school. They had a program for graduating seniors who couldn't afford college. The deal was I would spend the summer there, and then - go to whatever college I chose; they'd pay for everything, I just... had to spend every holiday and semester break working for them. Then after graduation, I was just - I was supposed to become a full-time test subject, but only for six months, and then I was... I was supposed to be done. But I was... I don't know, I was too good, or something. Apparently. They found ways to keep me. Like Michael said. Loopholes. Biological experiments while I was still under sedation. My eyes. The advanced knee replacements. They had me sign the consent form for those while I was drugged out of my mind, and then said my contract would have to be altered to fit the lifetime of the knee replacements, because... that was their equipment, and they couldn't just let me walk out with it. As they put it."

He pulled at the curved metal leg of one of the devices, watching intently as it snapped back into place. "I was at the base in Cleveland, Ohio. About a month before I was supposed to go h... go home, they shipped me out here. Michigan," he said, looking up at Steve. "In case you were wondering. Upper Peninsula. That's where we are." He looked back down. "That was... when I started to worry. The Enrichment Center was - where they were sending all the long-term test subjects. They'd been trying to convince me to sign up for a longer stint, the entire time I was there, but I always said no. I guess they just - they got tired of asking. And I couldn't stop them from moving me - it was in the contract. While I was there, I... had to do whatever they said." He took a deep breath. "They sent us here in _boxes_. We weren't even asleep. They - they pumped something into the trucks like the suspension gas Michael created, to keep us alive, and they just. Carted us up to the UP. I was... panicking. Just. The whole trip, I couldn't think, I couldn't - I could hardly breathe, I was... terrified, and I knew I couldn't be. I knew I - I had to just. _Stop._ Just focus. On surviving. That was... the last time I let them get to me. I couldn't afford to panic like that if I wanted to get through it, _live_ through it - the test chambers, the experiments, all of it. I was past the stage where they'd send me home for failure and at the point where they probably would have just killed me."

He ducked his head still further. "It was stupid. The whole thing. _I_ was stupid. I was - younger, than I should have been. To be making decisions like that in the first place. I - I was a couple years ahead. In school. I lied when I signed up, told them I was eighteen. I was sixteen. I didn't... I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I should have been out by the time I was old enough to drink. I was twenty-eight last time they put me in stasis."

Steve could hear the silence that ensued when Sam stopped talking, because it _rang_.

Michael was the first to break it. "Sam..."

"No." Sam shook his head. "No, no, nope. I'm not - I'm done talking, for the night. I just, I'm done. Tonight. I'm going to sleep."

And he lay down, turned his back to them, and held entirely too still to be even attempting to fall asleep.

Steve looked around at the others. "I think that's goodnight."

"We should all rest," The Spine agreed.

"St-Steve?" Rabbit prodded. "Can you sleep, dya think?"

"Yeah, I'll - I'll be fine. I'll rest, if nothing else."

He lay down, losing sight of the robots over the pile of scrap metal. He pulled the rag down over his eyes and kept them open, staring at the half dark.

Something tapped him on the shoulder. He lifted the rag to see Michael still sitting up, looking at him.

"Yeah?"

Michael darted his eyes away, took a deep breath, looked back. "It... It wasn't your fault. What... happened to that person. Just - dumb luck. You couldn't have known."

Steve swallowed. "Think I'm done talkin', too, Michael." He cleared his throat, dropping the rag back into place. "But thanks."

He closed his eyes under the strip of fabric and tried to pick a sound and focus on it.

It didn't really work. Not that he was surprised.

The noises of the robots floated over the scrap mound, sounding just different enough from most nights to make him suddenly aware of the divide.

He turned over on his side, curling up tight and trying to hone in on the sounds closest to him - Sam and Michael, one on either side. Their heartbeats were out of sync, and neither matched his. Sam's was faster than usual but still nowhere near Michael's. His own was somewhere in between the two. Steve shut his eyes harder and tried to convince himself there was some sort of rhythm between the three that he could lose himself in.

Across the fire mound, QWERTY started to sing - a twisted, squeaking perversion of one of Jenny's usual tunes. Rabbit told her to shut up. She did.

Eventually, Steve fell asleep.


	24. Not Again

The Propulsion Gel's next appearance did indeed involve a ramp.

All things considered, it ended well enough – somewhere about halfway between _didn't even notice_ and _seven life-form pileup_.

Steve landed on his feet, knees buckling under him immediately as the synthetics threw a tantrum about the rapid altitude shifts.

He heard something like someone shouting through water, and a moment later Sam had pulled him sideways and The Spine had landed in a crouch inches away – exactly where he'd been kneeling.

The bot straightened up, eyes sparking in alarm. “I'm sorry; I couldn't adjust – ”

“'S'fine,” Steve mumbled, waving him off. The sound of the impact – followed swiftly by that of the other bots – had left his head ringing all over again. He was dimly aware that he was on the ground, Sam kneeling nearby. Both of their hearts were beating too quickly.

Michael ran over, Rabbit and The Jon in tow. “Everyone okay?”

“Dandy,” Steve snapped. “Can we stop having these little get-togethers every time my head goes haywire?”

“Sure,” Sam said, sounding equal parts amused and defensive. Sam was good at bizarre mixes of that sort. He got to his feet and offered Steve a hand up. “Next time I'll let The Spine land on you.”

Steve bit his tongue. He accepted Sam's help and clutched at his shoulder while he regained his bearings. The ringing was starting to fade. “I – I didn't... mean... Thank you.”

“Sure thing.”

-

Sam was the first one to wake up the next morning. This wasn't unusual. Old habits died hard.

He sat in the half-light – the electrics in this corridor were failing – and turned his portal gun over and over in his hands.

He'd used probably fifty of the things, over the years. He'd never been _fond_ of them, exactly, any more than he supposed his father had been fond of the tools he'd been handed every day as he took his place in the assembly line. There was no sense of ownership or familiarity – they were necessary items, needed to get a job done.

This one, though. This was _his_. Somehow that made it different. He remembered thinking, when Michael had handed it over to him, all bright eyes and twitchy, hopeful smile – he remembered _laughing_ , actually. Quietly. To himself. Another gun, from another scientist, for another test.

He turned it over again, running a hand over the barrel and snorting at his own sentimentality. He was dangerously close to turning the device into a metaphor for his and Michael's developing friendship.

Now _there_ was a term that continued to simultaneously jolt him wide awake and make him deeply question the issue of whether or not he was in fact dreaming all this up back in his quarters. He hadn't had friends since early college. Real ones since high school.

A sharp gasp and the sudden shift from easy breathing to rapid, shallow panic somewhere off to his left told him Steve had awoken.

“Who's awake?” Steve asked, voice hoarse with sleep.

“Me,” said Sam, eyeing him carefully and reminding himself not to ask if he was all right. Steve never responded well to that.

“Sam,” he said, sounding dazed. “Sam. I think. I think I have a sister. Had a sister.”

Sam blinked. Somehow, he hadn't been expecting that. “You remembered her?”

“I don't remember her name.” Steve had opened his eyes and was staring into empty space. “Just a face. She looked... like me. Not – not like twins or anything. I think she's older. Was older. I think... She had kids. Two. A boy and a girl. Young.”

Oh.

Well. Damn.

Sam tried to find options to weigh. He worked better in the multiple choice format. Eventually he narrowed things down to Sympathy, Honesty, Commiseration, and Concern. He settled on Honesty. “I have no idea what to say to that that won't make you feel worse.”

Steve huffed a quiet laugh. “Thanks for not trying.”

It didn't _sound_ like sarcasm. “You're welcome,” he hazarded.

“Thanks for not asking if I'm okay.”

Sam shrugged. He wondered if Steve was about to tell him again that he was a good friend. He mostly hoped not. The first time he'd said it had nearly given him a heart attack, and he probably hadn't even meant it at the time.

“How long until the others wake up, d'you think?”

Sam shrugged. “Maybe a couple hours.”

Steve nodded blankly. “Right. Okay. Yeah. I think... I'm – gonna try and get some more sleep.”

“Good luck.”

\---

_(“...Something terrible's gonna happen soon.”_

“ _Probably. If it makes you feel any better, next time the Gel shows up there will probably be a ramp.”_

“ _That sounds potentially awful. Thanks. You're a good friend, Sam.” Steve pulled the rag down over his eyes. “I'm going to attempt sleep.”_

“ _...Goodnight,” Sam managed, his head suddenly spinning. He slid down the wall and stared at the ground, arms tight around himself._

_Of course Steve was his friend. And Michael. And the bots, and Jenny. And QWERTY, even. Of course. He'd just never thought the_ _**word** _ _. Or that they might consider him_ _**theirs** _ _. When was the last time_ _**anybody** _ _had –_

_He shook his head._

_He wasn't cut out to be anybody's friend. Let alone a good one.)_

\---

The chambers were getting more and more complex - and falling into more and more extensive disrepair.

The chasms were beginning to play a bigger role.

The gaping silence interacted strangely with that of The Jon's void, everything swirling into itself and blanketing Steve's senses like a powdery film of the most useless type of snow.

He preferred the Faith Plates to the moving platforms, really. All he had to do was step on and let himself be flung, holding still to keep his trajectory in check and keeping his mouth clamped shut so he wouldn't throw up.

The platforms were

a problem.

...

The platforms were terrifying.

He lost all sense of balance once they started moving, the mechanics at work tearing through the silence like a fork through spiderwebs - twisting everything up until it all stuck together and nothing made sense. He usually stood in the middle and held fast to one of the bots. On the bad days, he sat down.

This wasn't, surprisingly enough, one of the bad days. He stepped off of the platform, let go of The Spine's arm, and didn't even have to stop and mutter at the bottomless pit as he had on previous occasions that if he was going to be sick he was going to do so _directly into it_.

The rest of the room was a mess.

The ceiling had caved in over in one corner, rotten wood and insulation spilling out over the white tiles of the floor. Wires and cables slunk down the wall and pooled on the ground like coiled snakes.

The noise was, of course, atrocious. Energy spitting out of the ends of severed cables, metal and plaster straining to hold everything up, and there was some sort of exhaust fan running a floor above them. Even Sam and Michael were wincing.

Steve could pick out the individual sounds well enough. It was nothing too complex or intertwined - just overwhelmingly _loud_.

Halfway to the door, he heard it.

Humming. Low, rising slowly, buried under everything else. And a stuttering _**whirrr-shnk-whirrrr-shnk**_ ,the familiarity of which sent ice down his back.

He stopped. Stood stock still and tried to pinpoint the source of the noise, but it was covered with a thick coating of sparks and footsteps and splintering metal and the revving of the fan, and it was like trying to look through syrup. And there was a strange _distance_ to it, a delay, like it was coming from farther away than should have been possible. It didn't sound muffled through the ceiling the way the fan did, so it probably wasn't on the next floor up.

And what was more, he was pretty certain the others couldn't even hear it.

"Guys - "

_**CRTHUNKCH** _

The base of the Discouragement Beam broke through the wall.

On the other side of the chasm.

"Oh, _shit_."

_**whrrrrrMMMMMM** _

Fully charged.

Steve _willed_ time to slow down, as it had before.

He shut his eyes, acting on some instinct he didn't understand - he didn't have a better idea.

It was like turning a light on.

Michael was a few feet back and to his right. Sam was further back and on Michael's left, next to Rabbit, who had clamped a hand down on The Jon's shoulder - probably in a panic, trying to keep him still and less likely to run in to the line of fire. The Spine was in the middle of the group as oriented from the chasm, and the farthest to Steve's left.

All of this was the first thing he saw.

The second thing was the chasm. He skipped over it impatiently, brushing the silence off like so much sawdust. Snapped his fingers, without thinking, and let the sound carry over the pit and bounce off the opposite wall - returning with the location of the laser in relation to himself, and therefore the others.

_**SCHKFW** _

_Fire._

A single, short beam. Like before.

Michael.

It would hit Michael.

Steve turned, eyes still closed, and _moved_.

Like _hell_ it would hit Michael.

Steve gritted his teeth, judging footsteps and distances and positions – only one single actual, conscious _thought_ breaking through:

_We are not losing someone else._

_Not Michael._

_Not. **Again.**_

He ducked his head as he ran. Crouched. Sprang.

Impact. Confused shouting. Shut up, Michael.

The shot flew past, inches from the back of his head. Hit the wall and exploded in a shower of sparks.

They hit the ground, Michael first. Steve felt his wrist jam and instantly begin to heal.

The others were shouting - The Jon wailing, QWERTY screeching.

It

didn't hurt, as much. Not like it should have.

He realized everything was becoming shaky - his arms keeping him up, his breathing keeping him steady, his thoughts keeping him from panicking.

He opened his eyes.

Sound and sight bled together confusingly, mingling with his other senses just long enough to leave him with the bizarre impression of having heard the cold ground under his palm.

Michael was staring up at him, face white. "You - !"

Steve swallowed. "Uhm." He couldn't really think of anything more intelligent to say than that, so he said it again. "...Uhhm..."

"That almost hit you!"

Steve frowned, taken aback by the note of accusation in Michael's voice. "It was gonna hit _you_!"

"I could have moved!"

"You weren't even starting to; I would have heard it!"

Michael clicked his mouth shut.

Steve took a deep breath. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, fine. Just. Um. ...You?"

"Fine."

"...Good."

"...Yep."

"Steve," Rabbit piped up from behind them. "Ya gonna st-stay like that all day, or ya gonna kiss'im?"

Steve got to his feet, casually flipping Rabbit the bird as he offered Michael a hand up. Michael took it.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

Steve shrugged, uncomfortable with the gratitude. "Don't mention it. We should get moving."


	25. Victories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning for this chapter: Blood

By Michael's map, they were more than halfway through the chambers.

The map remained frustratingly reticent on the subject of what was _in_ them. The others had long since stopped kvetching about this, because it tended to lead to meek apologies from Michael, whose fault it patently wasn't.

Currently, they were trekking through a chamber that had clearly been designed by one of Aperture's best and brightest – that was to say, someone very very cruel. The required placements of the portals necessitated looping back around through passages they'd already been through at _least_ twice; launching up into the ceiling to fly headfirst and horizontal out over a raised platform; directing lasers nerve-wrackingly across the room at eye level to hit buttons that opened hidden chasms they could only be sure they weren't standing on if they trusted themselves to Steve's synthetics – which, if not for the recent breakthrough, he was almost sure would have killed him the second he stepped foot in the room.

The last laser redirection was a simple one – once the block was removed from in front of it, the beam would hit the far wall. If they put one portal there and another directly beside it, the laser would head back towards the original wall and hit the button right next to the base of the Discouragement Beam.

Sam set the portals. Steve was just turning to warn everyone to get out of the way so The Jon could move the block out of the laser's path, when he heard a muffled yelp and a mangled curse.

He turned back, alarmed. “Sam?”

Sam was standing ramrod straight, one hand over his mouth. He was trembling from head to foot, entire body jerking violently like he was being electrocuted.

“Michael!” Steve shouted, and in a flash they were both at Sam's side, Michael asking far too many questions far too quickly. Some part of Steve's mind made note of the strangeness of seeing this happen to somebody else.

“I – I –” Sam made a noise in the back of his throat like he was choking.

“You what? You _what_?”

“Michael, let him –”

“ _Eyeth_ ,” Sam rasped.

“Eyeth?” Michael repeated, sounding confused. “Eye - Eyes?”

Steve inhaled sharply. “ _Eyes!_ Michael, get rid of the portals!”

Michael scrambled to do so, hastily disconnecting the portal gun from Sam's arm and wrenching it from his white-knuckle grip. Steve, who had been waiting for it, caught Sam as he stumbled backwards, lowering them both to the floor. “You okay, man?”

Sam gasped for breath, patting Steve's arm in apparent gratitude. “I'b – fi'.” He sat up straight, slid away from Steve, and spat blood. “...Bih frough by _kt_ ou'ge - ow - i' all.”

“Oh, well,” said Steve, folding his arms. “If _that's_ all.”

“Alrea'y heali'g,” Sam assured him.

“What happened?” Michael asked quietly, setting the gun aside and crouching down to peer closely at Sam's face. Now that the immediate threat was over, Steve allowed himself a small, smug grin at seeing someone _else_  on the receiving end of this sort of interrogation – if only because he was sure Sam would appreciate the justification for a distracting argument if he happened to see it.

By this point, the bots had made their way over. The Spine and The Jon hovered off to the side, looking worried. Rabbit dropped into a careful crouch next to Michael, mimicking his scrutiny of Sam's face. "Sam? Y'all right, buddy?"

Sam shook his head. "Eyeth - eye... Eye modifications." He spoke carefully, spitting blood once more and then swallowing. "That... That is strange. Wow. That was... It doesn't even _hurt_ anymore."

Michael frowned. "Sam."

"I'm not changing the subject! Just - give me a second; it's hard to... focus... when this happens."

"Happens?" Steve demanded. "So this is - this is like... a thing? A... what am I trying to - it's a word, I swear -"

"Reoccurring?"

"...Yeah, that. This is a _reoccurring_ _thing_?"

Sam shrugged, trying to get to his feet and pitching forward onto his hands and knees. He sat back, shaking his head and pressing a hand over his eyes with a wince. "Not - not exactly. It's only happened - thhhree times. Before this. Certain... Certain portal orientations... If I look at them. Too long. Or at all. It's - it's like you. Steve. Kind of. Wrong - wrong, um. Sssignals. Confuses... the mechanics. Wires get crossed, or... something."

He made another attempt to stand. Rabbit put a hand under his arm and Steve surged forward to take his other side, and between them they managed to get him on his feet.

"Can you walk?" Steve asked, trying to adjust for their relative heights as Rabbit and Michael switched places for presumably that same reason - Michael was _tall_ , but Rabbit was, frankly, _hulking._

Sam gritted his teeth. "Probably not," he ground out, supporting this statement by continuing to be almost entirely a dead weight. "When that - happens... Sssomething in my brain, it - my mmmuscles lock up, and I get - I can't - afterwards, I'm not - quite - there. And my... head... It just - lllooking at... _seeing_... it - it's painful. Lasts - a couple hours. Maybe less, wihehihh-w-with the life support?" He took a deep breath. "I'll... be fine... after that."

"If you three stand clear of the Discouragement Beam," The Spine spoke up, "we can complete this task, and that should be the last thing before the door opens. I suggest we finish this quickly and rest in the corridor. They tend to be more structurally sound than the chambers."

"Right," Sam agreed, sounding dazed, and Steve and Michael half-dragged him safely out of the line of fire.

"I am so bringing this up next time you call me a dolphin," Steve muttered.

Sam laughed.

Steve took his victories where he could get them.


	26. Denied

The chambers were beginning to go more smoothly. This was not to say that it was getting any easier or less complex, only that they had grown more accustomed to the puzzles and were more capable of handling them.

The humans had muttered something a while ago about losing count of how many chambers they'd gone through. The Spine didn't tell them that this was their twenty-fifth. He didn't think they would appreciate the information.

In the middle of the twenty-fifth chamber, on a platform which they had reached by way of Aerial Faith Plates and which was barely large enough to allow all of them space away from the edge, there was a Cube.

It was similar to the Cubes they had already seen, with the added visual design element of a pale pink heart in the center of every face.

The Spine recognized it. They had seen many of these Cubes, broken or disassembled - never in the assembly stage itself, as Aperture had actively kept the three of away from anything that they cared about being observed or interfered with.

"Oh, hell no," said Sam, backing away nearly to the edge of the platform. The Spine quietly calculated the distance he would need to cover and the time he would need to do it in if Sam lost his balance.

"What's this for?" asked Steve, prodding the Cube dubiously with one foot. "I don't, uh - hear. Any buttons, on the other side."

"It's, um," said Michael, haltingly. "It's a... Weighted Companion Cube. They, um. Test subjects are supposed to... bond with it. And then, um. And then destroy it."

"I've never seen a whole one before," said The Jon, voice full of wonder. "It's kinda cute. Can we keep it?"

" _No_ ," Sam said sharply. "I am _not playing_ that psychological game again."

"It's nah-ahhht alive, Sam," Rabbit assured him. "We seen plenty'a the thi-things taken apart; there's nothin' l-livin' about'em."

"...The scientists always... And GLaDOS. She. They would imply, that - that the Cubes were sentient, that they could feel things, that they _liked you_ , and then you would have to _incinerate_ them, or leave them behind because of an emancipation grill, and..." Sam trailed off. "You're sure? I really wouldn't put it past Aperture to create sentient creatures solely for the purpose of destroying them to torment other sentient creatures. ...Namely, people."

"Nope!" said The Jon, cheerfully. "We've seen the insides. Lots of metal and wires and a few of them had voice boxes with certain phrases fed in, but no kind of brain. Pretty, though. I think I'll name this one Delilah."

The moving platform they had been waiting for finally unstalled and arrived, and they stepped carefully but quickly aboard to begin the ride to the other end of the chamber. The Jon hefted the Cube in both arms.

"Delilah had ple-plenty'a brains," Rabbit said sternly.

"Yeah, but she was also _pretty_."

"The Jon," Sam cut in. "Please don't keep that thing."

"You won't have to see it!" The Jon said hastily, stepping off the platform as it reached the other end. The others followed suit. "I'll keep it in here!"

And he opened up his chest and tossed the Cube into the void.

There was a soft _**thwump**_.

The Spine raised an eyebrow ridge. "Did that... _hit_ something?"

The Jon's eyes lit up brighter than normal. He bent his head to peer inside his own chest cavity, fishing around in the void with one hand.

With a shrill "HA!" of triumph (followed by a meek apology to Steve), he pulled out a hat.

_Rabbit's_ hat.

The Spine froze. "The - The Jon - ?"

"I _told_ you our stuff was safe in here somewhere!" He pulled out Rabbit's goggles next.

Rabbit gave a cry of joy and snatched both items from his brother, shoving a hand over the top of his head as though to ruffle the hair that hadn't been there in years. "Pappy's goggles! Jonny boy, I cou-ould kiss ya!"

The Jon giggled and continued digging around in the void, producing his own hat next. He plopped it onto his head and giggled again when it slipped down over his eyes. It had been fitted with the wig in mind.

Next came The Spine's hat. And then -

\- his tie.

Numbly, he set the hat on his head, and felt old protocols engage to lock it in place. (Peter the Fifth had outfitted all of their hats and heads with something that wasn't quite a magnet - was much stronger, much lighter, and much less damaging.)

He held the tie between his fingers, staring down at the faded red fabric and feeling something spark. The world began to phase out, giving way to blank contemplation of subjects best left alone.

Rabbit was the oldest, of course. Of course. Everyone knew. Rabbit was the first, the pride and joy but also the problem, the prototype that was never scrapped but instead built and built on, modified and improved and repaired, repaired, repaired - _working_ , always working, built to last and built by the best, but never the best himself, never top of the line, never as good as he _could_ be if he or Colonel Walter or any of his successors had been willing to backtrack far enough to fix some basic design flaws.

Rabbit was the prototype. The Spine was the result. Not the finished product - never finished. Always updated, upgraded, as far ahead of the curve as possible - pieces and parts taken out, redesigned, rendered obsolete and disposed of, something shiny and new in their place. The Spine was built to be the best he could be, the best science could provide, the best the Walters could do, and that was pretty darn good.

Rabbit was the oldest but The Spine was the strongest, the protector, the leader - he had to be. It was one of his primary functions, not technically programmed into him but so obvious it didn't need to be. Rabbit and The Jon were his brothers and he was stronger than them, so he would protect them. Always.

Which meant he couldn't panic.

_Worrying_ was fine - worrying was looking towards the future, worrying was planning and preparing and being _ready_ , no matter how terrible it made him feel at the time.

He couldn't panic. He couldn't stop. He couldn't take the time to miss what had been, couldn't wonder about what _might_ have, couldn't mourn the past or the people in it because he had the whole rest of the future to worry about for the three of them and there was no _time_.

Except once.

He had mourned The Jon. Once the shock had worn off and he and Rabbit had looked at each other and known without saying that there was nothing they could do and it was time to stop pretending because the promises, the _lies_ , the idea that they would find some way to fix it - that had all been for The Jon's benefit and there was no point in keeping it up now because he was _gone_.

Rabbit was the oldest and The Spine was the protector and The Jon was their unstable, unquantifiable, occasionally unhinged little brother and they had both failed him and they would both mourn him because he deserved it.

The Spine had sat in the dark and felt the oil run down his face as he clutched Rabbit's hand and tried to quiet the older bot's wrenching sobs, tried to maintain some shred of stoicism because The Jon deserved to be mourned but Rabbit deserved to be looked after.

Rabbit had pulled The Spine to him and told him it was all going to be okay, and The Spine had let him because Rabbit liked being the protector sometimes, the big brother, and The Spine would pretend to allow himself to need that if it would help.

But that was _it_. That was the exception and there had been no more, because there _hadn't been_ _ **time**_. There hadn't been time to dwell on the past because he still had the whole rest of the future to worry about for the two of them. And he'd known, he'd _known_ Rabbit wasn't going to last forever, known that eventually something was going to go wrong that they couldn't fix, and if he'd let himself think about what had already gone wrong on top of worrying about what he'd known was _going to_ , he would have just - shut down. And that couldn't happen; he couldn't leave Rabbit like that.

And then Michael and the others had arrived, and for the first time in a long time, The Spine had _had_ something - he had had _hope_. And then, somehow - _somehow_ , he had got his brother back. And that had been enough, _more_ than enough, to hold on to.

But now - this.

This hat - this thing that _he_ had picked out, because he was a _person_ , with thoughts and opinions and feelings _(ings ings ings feelings no store lock lock lock block access_ _ **error e r r o r**_ _)_ , not a toy for Aperture to play with. Not -

a machine.

A person.

And the tie. The tie his creator had given him, the _gift_ his _father_ had given him, because he had been somebody's _child_ once. Because he had been allowed to be a protector and still need _(needs fulfilled all systems functional all other needs lowest priority)_ things, still need answers and hope and love and something, _anything_ to hold on to in the dark and the quiet.

That had ceased with Aperture - even before being stranded, before the reality of losing The Jon had ever occurred to any of them, before... all this. The second they had set foot in Aperture, The Spine had realized the mistake, realized that nothing at all here was going to go right and that they - he - would have to fight as hard as possible to survive.

So he had done what was necessary. He had improvised. He had altered his way of thinking, much more literally than any organic lifeform could. He had raised his brothers' well-being and his own physical needs - hardware, software, wiring, repairs - to top priority and shut everything else down as far as it could go - _Am I safe? Am I happy?_ It hadn't mattered. That wasn't important. He had locked away emotions - never deleting them; he couldn't quite bring himself to that, couldn't do that to himself or his brothers, couldn't fathom what he might become should he take that final step.

And when they had been abandoned, he had continued exactly as he was. He had moved forward, never admitting weakness because it wasn't there to admit to because he didn't _allow_ it. Always focusing on what needed to be done next, _using_ emotions, letting them tinge his words if Rabbit was being stubborn about something important or The Jon needed to hear sincerely that he was loved and that they would do anything for him - but otherwise he had pushed them away, so very far away from his main processes, compressing and compressing them and storing them behind strings of locked code, moving forward, always moving forward - and now they were _safe_ , they were getting _out -_ there was nothing to think about, worry about, focus on, and his tie was in his hands and he _**couldn't**_ _anymore -_

he was _afraid_ he was _sorry_ he was _lost_ he had failed one brother and would have failed the other he was the protector he had failed he _wanted out_ he was so afraid afraid afraid he missed the light he missed Peter V and Annie and Wanda and little Peter VI he missed Pappy he missed himself what had he done with him he couldn't do this do this this this this

error readouts blocking his vision, warnings flashing, body rattling, he was going to shake himself to pieces, high hissing sounds escaping mouth nose joints steam everywhere kettle screaming on the stove that noise was going to hurt Steve -

Voices, not processing, take language down to basics, "The Spine, - - -, - - - - on, - - - - here, sit down, - - - - - wrong?"

He followed blindly, stumbling, registering dimly the hands at his wrists, guiding, leading - clamped tight, protecting.

He was turned around, backed up. Hit a wall - he thought, hoped - slid down it, limbs falling, useless, _**e rr o r e r r or er r o r**_ , alarms beginning to settle now that he was no longer upright, no longer relying on himself for balance.

Take the language back up, slowly, - _The Spine, c-can you hear me? Can you see me? What's wrong? Say somethin'.-_

Rabbit. Rabbit is worried you're worrying Rabbit you can't do that say something _do something_

_can't_

_**e r r o r** _

he held still, afraid to move, afraid he'd break himself into a hundred pieces, afraid of all the error messages, bright and hot and _**e r r o r err o r  e r ror**_ flashing before his eyes, afraid for himself

        himself

                himself

                         himself

                                   denied

"Can you hear me better like this -" - _or like this?_ -

Slowly, he fired signals, forced movement - shook his head. Not sure what he meant, but it was a response, it was _something_.

- _Can you hear this?_ -

Nod. Slowly. Careful. Don't break you'll shatter

sharp metal everywhere these

_feelings_ all over the ground code hot and wrong and poisonous like lightning

- _Tell me w-what's wrong._ -

The words wouldn't come, even in his head - he bundled up the memories, the concepts, as best he could, and sent it all through before he could think better of it.

Quiet.

- _I was afraid you were doin' somethin' like that._ -Sad. Not angry, but sad, he'd made Rabbit sad, he had to fix this had to no no no stop _stop_

- _Didn't wanna say anything; was af-fraid I'd – break ya._ -

He would have laughed if he could because Rabbit was right, he was broken

was     broken

_I'm_

_breaking_

had broken a long time ago and now the cracks were showing.

He needed _words_ , not this flood of emotions - destroying, conflicting, and all the worse when they _weren't_ , when they _agreed_ , when they matched and grew and rose up and chewed at his mind, chasing away logic and thought in waves and packs and droves he needed _words_

The error script was fading; he looked up into Rabbit's photoreceptors and _thought_ , desperately, throwing all his focus into dredging up something, anything, any _words_ that might convey the minefield in his head -

- _too much too much_ _ **too much**_ _I'm sorry Rabbit please can't please please_ _ **help me**_ -

The hands left his wrists, moved to his shoulders - he was pulled forward, arms around him, wrapped tight.

- _It's okay._ -

The Spine was the protector, but Rabbit was the oldest, had seen him built, had seen him before he could walk or talk, had seen him before he was strong.

Rabbit knew, had always known, how to be the big brother, whether his little brothers thought they needed it from him or not.

The Spine lay his head against Rabbit's chest and wept.

Gradually - the shaking, the horrid rattling subsided; the emotions, old, too old, died off, tore themselves apart and fed back into his system as potentials; the last of the error readout fell away. Gradually, he was better. Himself. He could think. He could move.

He wrapped his arms around Rabbit and continued to weep.


	27. They Deserved Better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d grown accustomed to expecting death around every corner, but he was out of practice at actually running into it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Death, skeletons.
> 
> A note about Rabbit: http://psilentasincjelli.tumblr.com/post/78929918603/

The skeletons were old.

Scraps of orange hung off of kneecaps and ankles, all that was left of the jumpsuits, and Sam wondered unbidden if the fabric had disintegrated with the passage of time or if something had — _gotten_ to it.

Beside him, Michael had gone very still. QWERTY was emitting a low, distressed whine.

"Those are… awfully s-small skeletons," The Jon said quietly.

Sam took a deep breath, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I was sixteen when they took me, remember. I’m sure I wasn’t the youngest.”

Steve took a half step forward. “Should we… I mean… We can’t just. _Leave_ them like this.”

"Well what do you suggest we do, Steve, _bury_ _them_? Toss them in one of the pits?” He said it before he could stop himself, old fear seizing his brain and halting all efforts towards unnecessary things like _tact_. This was not the first time he’d shared a chamber with its previous test subjects. GLaDOS had been fond of reminding him of the price of failure.

But it had been… a long time. He’d grown accustomed to expecting death around every corner, but he was out of practice at actually running into it — Jenny had _counted_ , of course, but there was nothing quite like a human skeleton to remind you of your own mortality.

Up went the walls.

He was barely aware of Steve’s bristling response. Before any sort of argument could really get underway, Rabbit stepped forward, raised his hands, and said firmly, “ _Nuh_ - _uh_. We ain’t d-doin’ this. They s-suffered enough in l-l-l-life. We ain’t st-startin’ a fight over’em n-n-n-now that th-they’re _dead_. The Sp-spine, say somethin’.”

The Spine straightened abruptly, looking startled. “What?”

"S-say a few words!"

"Why me?!"

"Why not? Y-ya didn’t g-get a rep-eputation as a sm-smooth talker f-for n-nothin’."

"Um." He shifted his weight, and made a sound like he was clearing his throat. "I’m… sure they were… Rabbit, this is _ridiculous_. I have no idea who these people were.”

"They were test subjects," Sam said, surprising himself. His voice was hoarse. "I’ll tell you everything about them: They made it this far. They had something to live for. Maybe each other, maybe something outside, maybe both. They were lied to, they were manipulated, they were murdered. They deserved better."

The Jon patted him on the back. Sam gritted his teeth and managed not to smack his arm away.

Rabbit disengaged his lower jaw, and the bones went up in a wall of flickering heat.

_Now they can rest._

They got through the chamber without much difficulty.

Sam tried not to feel like they were insulting the dead.

—

"We’re gonna make it."

It was late, by Sam’s own internal clock, and he was tired, and he couldn’t sleep. He looked up at Michael and applied all of his remaining energy to the task of not laughing in his face. “I’m glad you think so.”

"We will, Sam. I know we will."

"Good for you. Excuse me if I’m not quite as optimistic."

Michael sat next to him against the corridor wall, and they watched the others wordlessly for a few moments. The bots were shut down, quiet and still, a faint glow eking out from behind The Jon’s chest plates. Steve was curled up near The Spine, rag wrapped around his head, chest rising and falling in rare peaceful slumber.

"It’s not a matter of optimism," Michael murmured, eyes roaming over his friends and catching for a moment on Steve. He pitched his voice lower. "It’s necessity. It’s how I work. I can’t… _not_ believe things will work out for the best. I wouldn’t be able to function.”

"Ah." Sam crossed his arms. "Well, that’s a relief. For a minute there I thought you were trying to cheer me up."

Michael sighed. “I don’t know _what_ I’m trying to do. Share techniques, I guess.”

"You have your coping mechanisms, I have mine. Mine are just less… happy."

"If it’s any consolation," Michael said, stretching and wincing as his neck cracked, "it does have the unfortunate side effect of occasionally making me feel like all of my emotions are false defense mechanisms my brain employs to keep me from completely falling apart."

"Terrific. I sometimes feel like if I do get out of here, I’ll find a reason to hate everything about the outside world because I’m determined to be miserable. Should we wake Steve up and find out what’s wrong with _him_?”

"I’m sure he’d come up with a list."

Sam sighed, leaning forward against his knees and trying to roll the tension out of his shoulders. “We’re gonna need so much goddamn therapy wh- if we get out of here.”

"You started to say —"

"Careful." In spite of himself, he smirked. "I am a house of cards balanced precariously on bitterness and cynicism. Genuine hope might knock the whole thing down."

—

In the next chamber, in front of a wall of inoperable Discouragement Beam generators, two rusted hulks lay hand in hand. The metal of the taller one’s legs was twisted and charred; its body was shaped almost like a turret, one orange eye open and staring from near the center. A trail of scorched, melted tiles ran from the shorter one, nothing but limbs on an empty frame missing what must have been a round body, to the edge of a pit that stretched silent and mocking and as far as the eye could see.

They took longer to burn.


End file.
